By Emma Rooksby, co-ordinator of the Growing Illawarra Natives website

This was meant to be a 'grass' week. I had it all planned, to write about another of the interesting local grass species and raise its profile out there in the wilds of the World Wide Web. Grasses aren't that much favoured by social media influencers, except perhaps as a background, so I'm trying to do my bit to help them out. But the grasses will have to wait. 

This week I'm mourning the loss of our Clover Tree, or Goodia lotifolia. Unfortunately, our Clover Tree went almost overnight from being a handsome 3m shrub with graceful arching branches and lacy mid-green foliage to something utterly shrivelled up, brown and dead.

I'm devastated, because it was such a beautiful plant and has been in our garden for over a decade, flowering, fruiting and attracting native pollinators.  

Although I was terribly sad to lose the Clover Tree in our garden, it's actually one that can be seen around the place in areas of regenerating rainforest and on the margins of rainforest. You should be able to see it at Minnamurra Falls and Bombo Headlands. 

It's fast-growing and can put on a couple of metres of growth in a good year, and the vivid green new growth is pretty distinctive. The clover-shaped leaves and numerous yellow flowers in spring also make it quite recognisable among the hundreds of different plant species that grow around the Illawarra. 

 As you might guess from its flowers, Clover Tree is in the pea (Fabaceae) family. This means it does more than just look pretty in a garden or natural area.

It has the ability to 'fix' nitrogen via its roots, rather than requiring a nitrogen-based fertiliser source to be applied. Once a Clover Tree such as the one in my garden has died, it breaks down and the nitrogen it has fixed as a plant is then made available to other plants growing in the area. So at least there's a bit of a silver lining to the death of our Clover Tree.

I won't be pulling it out and chucking it in the green bin. I'll be chopping up the dead stems and leaving them to degrade down on the spot, providing nutrients for the other plants in that area of the garden.