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

Yellow Buttons, oh Yellow Buttons, you're such a mystery plant to me! I see your cheerful orange-yellowy flowers year-round in our garden, used in landscaping at the Botanic Garden, in random planter boxes at the Fairy Meadow shops, and on public and private properties all around the region.

You add local colour and cheer, with your grey-green felty-textured leaves the perfect background to the flowers. You are a landscaper's delight. As a bonus, your natural distribution is enormous, right across south-eastern Australia, an indication of a species that is versatile and adaptive in a wide range of conditions. 

 But… in our local natural areas, there are very few records of this species occurring naturally. Shoalhaven tick, Sydney tick, but in Illawarra not so much. Yellow Buttons has been recorded at Croom Reserve in Albion Park, but that's about it.

If you take a wander at Croom, in the more open sections of woodland, you may be lucky enough to see a plant or two. As they flower more or less year-round, this makes them fairly easy to spot. Croom Reserve is characterised by its soil, which is derived from sandstone, and is lower-nutrient compared with the soils of most of the Illawarra coastal plain. This may be the reason that Yellow Button only occurs there. Alternatively, there might be other reasons, such as the impacts of land clearing in recent decades.  

Whatever the reason, Yellow Buttons (Chrysocephalum apiculatum) remains an adaptable and appealing local species, particularly suited to part-shade conditions and well-drained soils. Below is a classic example of how Yellow Buttons is used in landscaping, with carefully managed individual plants ranged in with other species in an orderly display.