try your local greening Australia people or go to the nearest field day and hunt for the weed displays, they have books and info . For Gums look for: Field guide to eucalypts Volume 1: south-eastern Australia, second edition. By M.I.H. Brooker and D.A. Kleinig
I find 'The Native Trees and Shrubs of South-eastern Australia' by Leon Costermans to be an excellent, informative and easy to use book. Well illustrated and with good information for every bio-region from semi-arid to alpine. For weeds I think you should look on the web at places such as nccma.gov.vic.au
Cheers
Ian
I think the best recent plant descriptions for gardeners are in Angus Stewart's book Creating an Australian Garden. The Costermans book and many other guides are best used as field guides for identifying native plants in the bush, but it seems like you are after a list to help in selecting plants for a garden.
Happy gardening!
Les Robinson's 'Field Guide to the Native Plants of Sydney' is an excellent book which I used to recommend to undergrad biogeography students. It's worth mentioning it's existence but it probably isn't for you, for two reasons.
It's geographic range: while it's useful range extends well beyond Sydney it's basically limited to the coast and nearby ranges. It's relevance rapidly decreases inland.
It is a field guide, not a picture book: It's in black and white and uses diagrams and description of diagnostic features, not pictures, for identification. Overall this works better but it takes a bit of learning. There is a key guide at the front which guides you to the right area. Some plants can only be identified (at least by an amateur like me) when they are flowering and a very few need a hand lens (eg some bi-pinnate acacias can only be distinguished by counting oil glands on the leaf's central stem).
Are you intending to identify local plants or plan a garden?
