Stone the crows and starve the flamin’ lizards.

Forgive me, readers, but that was my reaction when I heard that the “Powers that Be” have adorned the nature strips along Mildura most famous boulevard with 200 Pistacia chinensis trees, an east Asian alien.

Our ancient island has one of the world’s richest, most spectacular and floras, and we plant Chinese pistachios for the short-lived spectacle of their autumn foliage.

Australia does not have an authentic autumn, or “fall’, as North Americans know it.

We have numerous monsoonally deciduous trees, like the Illawarra flame tree, Brachychiton acerifolium, but only one native plant is truly winter-deciduous: Tasmania’s lovely little tanglefoot beech, Nothofagus gunnii.

The Australian flora has 24,000 native species.

Green and pleasant England gets by with just 1700 indigenous species.

For all our botanical wealth, it is to England, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas that most Australians still turn when planting their gardens, and most of our landscape gardeners seem to be nostalgic for landscapes that are utterly alien to this county.

For more of this story, purchase your copy of Saturday’s Sunraysia Daily 17/10/2009.