Photo: mrpbps, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Varied-leaf Dampiera
Dampiera diversifolia
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Varied-leaf Dampiera does not carry the long medicinal or culinary history that fills most pages of this atlas, and honesty matters more than a good story here. It belongs to the Goodeniaceae, a family centered almost entirely in Australia, and its reputation has been built in gardens rather than in apothecaries. Since the mid twentieth century, native-plant growers in Australia have prized it as one of the most reliable low groundcovers for rockeries, embankments, and border edges, valued simply for the way its small oval leaves disappear beneath a haze of blue flowers for months at a stretch. It remains, by and large, a specialist's plant, well loved by those who know it and largely unwritten about elsewhere.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Remedies & preparations
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- ✦Kangaroo paw
- ✦Grevillea
- ✦Scaevola (fan flower)
- ✦Scaevola aemula for a similar blue groundcover effect
- ✦Convolvulus sabatius where a trailing blue-flowered edge plant is wanted
“For the gardener who wants a quiet blue haze along a sunny, well-drained edge, and nothing more complicated than that.”
The genus Dampiera honors William Dampier, the English explorer and sometime pirate who, during his 1699 voyage along the coast of New Holland, became one of the first Europeans to collect and describe Australian plants, more than seventy years before Cook's better-remembered landing.
No documented food or medicinal use; grown as an ornamental and not meant to be eaten.