Dog Safe Plants Australia: What the Lists Actually Know

If your dog has eaten part of a plant, ring your vet now — do not wait to see whether it gets sick. Take a piece of the plant with you, with leaves and flowers or fruit on it, because identification changes treatment. Australia’s Animal Poisons Helpline runs 24 hours on 1300 869 738.

Walk into Bunnings looking for something to replace an oleander and the advice you will be given is lilly pilly. It is in their own guide, under the oleander entry: “Try instead: Lilly pilly makes for a wonderful screening plant.” It is a reasonable suggestion. Lilly pilly is hardy, it screens, it is native, and half the fences in this country have one behind them.

What nobody tells you is that there is no published evidence that lilly pilly is safe for dogs, and no published evidence that it is dangerous. There is nothing. The plant has never been assessed.

Leave the plant where it is. What that gap tells you about is the way dog safe plants lists in Australia are actually built, and once you can see the machinery you can read any of them properly. This page shows you the machinery, and then gives you a planting list with the confidence marked honestly on each entry.

Is lilly pilly safe for dogs?

The short answer is that nobody has tested it, and the sources that appear to say otherwise are quieter than they look.

Dr Andrew Spanner, an Adelaide veterinarian, publishes one of the few Australian safe-plant lists with a veterinarian’s name on it. Lilly pilly is on it. It is also one of his favourites — “My favourites here are Lilly pilly, Westringia and Correa, as you can tell by the garden at Walkerville Vet!”

His entry reads: “Lilly pilly (Syzygium comes in a wide variety of sizes so don’t get a tree by mistake)*”. That asterisk is the important character in the sentence. He defines it at the top of the page:

“Note: any plant can be toxic if enough is consumed. You will reduce the risk further by offering edible grass to chew on. The items marked with an asterisk (*) have no data but widespread usage suggests that they are safe.”

So the one Australian vet publishing a safe list has marked lilly pilly as a plant with no data, where the reassurance comes from how many of them are growing in gardens without incident. He says so plainly, and he is right to. Not every entry on his list carries that mark. Callistemon, tea tree and camellias do not, and neither does the spider plant — those are the ones he is telling you he knows about.

The other place an Australian is sent to check is the ASPCA’s toxic and non-toxic plants database, which the RSPCA and Bunnings both name. Lilly pilly is not in it. Neither is Syzygium, the genus. I checked that by walking all sixty-nine pages of the database index and searching the complete list of 1,024 entries, because the database’s own search box does not work the way it looks like it works — more on that below.

Absence from that database is not a clearance. It is a gap, and the database says so itself.

The three things that matter most

“Non-toxic” on a plant list means “not reported to us”, and nothing stronger. Every database in this chain is compiled from reported poisoning cases, and none of them is compiled from testing. Each one says so. A plant sits on the toxic side because an animal was hurt and the case was recorded, and it is missing altogether because nobody has called about it.
Get the botanical name before you trust any verdict. Marigold, hibiscus, plumbago and bottlebrush each name more than one plant, and in three of those four cases the “safe” answer belongs to a different species from the one sold in Australian nurseries under that name.
The short list of garden plants that genuinely hurt Australian dogs is short. Cycads, Brunfelsia, white cedar and macadamia carry most of it, and they are worked through on our page on plants that poison dogs in Australia. This page is about the other side of the question.

Where an Australian “safe plant” list comes from

Follow the advice back one step at a time and the chain is short.

Bunnings publishes a garden guide called The most poisonous plants for pets, written by Bunnings magazine in November 2023 and quoting an emergency veterinarian, Dr Hannah Ritchie of Animal Emergency Service Carrara. It is a decent piece of writing. It tells readers: “Plants known to be poisonous or hazardous should be labelled accordingly. You could also check the common or scientific name in a list of toxic and non-toxic plants at rspca.org.au or aspca.org.”

So the trail goes to the RSPCA. The RSPCA’s page on this is titled “Where can I find out about plants that might be poisonous for my pets?”, last updated in December 2023, and the title is doing exactly what it says. The page contains no list. It contains one worked example — lilies — and five referrals to other bodies.

Those five are worth naming, because the RSPCA is more careful here than it gets credit for. It sends readers first to the Australian Animal Poisons Helpline, then to the ASPCA, then to the University of Illinois veterinary library, then to Cornell, and finally to a CSIRO book by the veterinary toxicologist Dr Ross McKenzie, Australia’s Poisonous Plants, Fungi and Cyanobacteria: A Guide to Species of Medical and Veterinary Importance. One Australian phone service, one Australian book, three American databases.

What the RSPCA says about the American one is the sentence that travels: the ASPCA “lists toxic and non-toxic plants”. That phrase gets repeated down the chain until a shopper is standing in a garden centre believing that somewhere there exists a list of plants confirmed harmless to dogs.

What the ASPCA database says about itself

The database opens with a scope note that most people scroll straight past. In full:

“This list contains plants that have been reported as having systemic effects on animals and/or intense effects on the gastrointestinal tract. Please note that the information contained in our plants list is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather a compilation of the most frequently encountered plants. Individual plants may differ in appearance from the photos used on our listings. Please be sure to check the name of the plant to determine its toxicity.”

And immediately after it: “Also, be advised that the consumption of any plant material may cause vomiting and gastrointestinal upset for dogs and cats.”

Read the first clause slowly. “Plants that have been reported as having” — this is a record of what a North American poison control centre has been telephoned about. It is a case series. It is not a testing programme, it does not claim to be one, and the phrase “not meant to be all-inclusive” is the organisation telling you in advance that things are missing.

That makes the “non-toxic” column a different kind of statement from the “toxic” one. A toxic entry means somebody’s animal was hurt and the case was recorded. A non-toxic entry means the plant has come up often enough to be assessed and no systemic harm was found. And a plant that appears in neither column means nobody has called about it, which is the position lilly pilly is in, along with most of the Australian bush.

The search box that returns a false answer

One practical warning, because this will catch you if you go and check a plant yourself.

The ASPCA list page has a search field. Typing a plant name into the web address as a search parameter returns results that look like a genuine answer and are not — the parameter is ignored, and the page returns the same unfiltered first screen of A-names whatever you ask it. I found this by searching for “sago palm”, a plant I knew was in the database, and getting back exactly the same twelve rows I got for “spider plant”. Anyone testing for a plant’s absence that way gets a false negative every single time.

Guessing at a plant’s page address is no better. Staghorn fern, bromeliad, pilea, snapdragon and marigold all return a “page not found”, and every one of those plants is in the database under a different name. The only sound way to check is to use the alphabetical index and read the letter your plant starts under, in both its common and its botanical name.

The Australian plants the database has never heard of

Having walked the whole index, here is what is missing. Every one of these was checked against all 1,024 entries, under both common and botanical names.

Absent from the ASPCA database entirely:

Lilly pilly (Syzygium)
Grevillea
Banksia
Wattle (Acacia)
Melaleuca, and tea tree (Leptospermum)
Westringia and Correa
Lomandra, Dianella, and sedges (Carex)
Kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos)
Pigface (Carpobrotus) and native violet (Viola)
Buffalo grass (Stenotaphrum) and kikuyu (Pennisetum)

That is most of an Australian native garden and most of an Australian lawn, missing from the database an Australian is told to consult. None of those absences means a plant is dangerous. None of them means it is safe either. It means the question has not been asked in the place where the answers are kept.

And the absence that cuts the other way

It would be easy to stop there, because everything above flatters the argument. So here is the one that does not.

Agapanthus is also absent from the database — and agapanthus is on Dr Spanner’s do-not-plant list, and on ours. It grows in every second front yard in the country. The same silence that covers lilly pilly covers a plant an Australian vet actively tells you to avoid.

So the gap runs in both directions, and that is the honest way to hold it. A plant missing from the list is not thereby safe and not thereby dangerous. It is unexamined, and you have to get your answer somewhere else.

Is lomandra safe for dogs?

Lomandra deserves its own answer, because it is one of the plants an Australian dog is most likely to meet. It is a standard choice for council verges, new-estate garden beds and carpark landscaping, which means a great many dogs walk past it every day and some of them chew it.

Four sources have something to say, and together they give a clearer answer than any one of them does alone.

The ASPCA database has never heard of it. Lomandra appears in the absence list above for a reason. Walking all sixty-nine index pages and collecting every entry gives 1,024 of them, re-counted on 17 October 2026, and neither “lomandra” nor “mat rush” is among them, while Sago Palm, Aloe, Arum Lily and all three Cordyline entries come back as expected. The question has not been asked in the place Australians are told to look.

The one Australian vet publishing a safe list puts it on the list, with the asterisk. Walkerville Vet’s “Grasses and Strap-Leafed Plants” section reads “Clumping grasses* (esp Lomandra)”, and the legend immediately above the list defines that asterisk: “The items marked with an asterisk (*) have no data but widespread usage suggests that they are safe.” So lomandra is on an Australian safe list, and the list itself says the entry rests on how often it is planted.

The same vet was asked this exact question and answered it. In the comments under that page, on 10 July 2022, a reader named Ruby asked “Hi are lomandras bad for dogs?” The reply: “Hi Ruby. There is no information but I have planted them in the past in my veterinary clinic so you can see I’m not too concerned by them. Perhaps a greater worry is that they do have spiky leaf tips and sometimes also flowering spikes for small dogs.” That is a working Australian vet telling an owner there is no information, giving his own behaviour as the evidence, and then pointing at a hazard that has nothing to do with poisoning.

And there is one toxicological suspicion, in the wrong species, and it has never been confirmed. An Australian veterinary toxicology text hosted by Animal Health Australia covers the grasstrees, Xanthorrhoea, whose flower spikes cause a reversible staggering syndrome in cattle known as wamps or wallum disease. Inside that entry sits this sentence: “Lomandra longifolia (spiny-headed mat-rush) and Lomandra leucocephala ssp. leucocephala (woolly mat-rush, irongrass) have been suspected of producing a very similar syndrome in cattle (RA McKenzie, unpublished data) but experimental confirmation of toxicity is lacking.”

Read that sentence slowly, because every qualifier in it is doing work. Suspected. In cattle. On unpublished data. And experimental confirmation is lacking. The confirmed cases of that syndrome belong to the grasstrees; lomandra is the plant standing next to them under suspicion. Cattle also eat plants by the mouthful over weeks, which is the exposure the syndrome needs, and a dog chewing a leaf is not doing that.

One coincidence is worth noticing without being turned into a claim. The vet’s practical worry and the toxicologist’s unconfirmed suspicion both land on the same part of the plant, the flowering spike. They land there for unrelated reasons, in unrelated species, and no one has connected them. It is a reason to pay slightly more attention to a lomandra in flower than to one that is not.

The honest answer, then. Nobody has tested lomandra in dogs. It carries no listing in the database most people are sent to, it sits on the one Australian safe list under an asterisk that means “no data”, and the only toxicological suspicion attached to the genus that I could find is unconfirmed, unpublished and about cattle. A vet who has planted it at his own clinic is not worried about it. The risk an owner can actually act on is the one that vet named: the leaf tips are sharp and the flower spikes are stiff, and a small dog that shoves its face into a clump can be scratched or poked by it.

That is a weaker answer than the word “safe”, and it is the one the sources will actually support.

Is agapanthus safe for dogs?

Agapanthus grows along driveways, around letterboxes and down the side of half the houses in this country — strap leaves in a clump, a ball of blue flowers on a long bare stem. It is also on the avoid list further down this page. Six sources have something to say about it. They disagree with each other, two of them disagree while sharing a university, and the disagreement is the useful part.

A veterinary school names dogs. The Toxic Plant Garden at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is a teaching collection of plants poisonous to animals, started in 1970. Its entry reads “Lily of the Nile (Agapanthus africanus)”, labelled “Toxic to cats, dogs”, and the description says: “Contains saponins and alkaloids which are known to cause digestive issues. Generally toxic to all pet species, the plant is poisonous by ingestion and can cause skin irritation. Symptoms are irritation of skin and eyes, ulceration around the mouth and gastrointestinal upset.” The garden’s listings carry no citations, so what it offers is a veterinary school’s teaching position. It is still the only source here that puts the words “toxic” and “dogs” together about this plant.

Queensland Health publishes a full entry, and the entry is about people. The Queensland Poisons Information Centre has a page for Agapanthus praecox, last updated November 2024. Under Toxicity it reads “Potentially toxic” and “Irritant to skin or eyes”. Under Symptoms: “Symptoms may include nausea vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhoea if ingested, with severe ulceration of the mouth from the clear sticky sap. Skin contact with the sap may cause a burning sensation, skin irritation and rashes.” Further down: “All parts of the plant are poisonous, especially the rhizome or root, leaves and sap.” The banner at the top of the page says “Seek medical attention for all ingestions.”

Read that for what it is. The Poisons Information Centre advises the public about people, its plant index describes plants poisonous to people, and the page mentions dogs, cats, pets and animals nowhere at all. What makes it worth printing here is that it arrived independently at the sign the vet school describes. A Queensland government page about humans and a Californian veterinary school about dogs both land on ulceration of the mouth, and both put it down to the sap.

And a third source, from the same university as the second, gives the quantity. University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources publishes a planting guide which says of the same plant: “Agapanthus lilies are of minimal toxicity to animals unless eaten in large quantities.” It adds: “Where a dog or cat is prone to chewing on plants, it would be prudent to remove the plant from the animals environment.” Its answer to a thorns-and-spines question is No, and it notes the sap “can be irritating to some people”.

Hold those two side by side, because one institution is saying both things. The vet school’s garden calls it toxic to dogs. The same university’s extension service calls it minimally toxic to animals except in quantity, and recommends removing it anyway from the garden of a dog that chews plants. Both can be true at once, and together they describe a plant that will hurt a dog’s mouth and will not poison it systemically from one bite.

The Australian vet whose list this page keeps returning to puts it on his avoid side, and leaves the asterisk off. Walkerville Vet’s “Plants To Avoid With Dogs” list opens like this: “It’s worth a quick list of the plants I don’t recommend, especially with puppies who tend to chew everything. You’ll notice that these are generally the more ornamental species. Asterisks (*) mark the extremely toxic plants.” Agapanthus is the second entry, paired with clivia. Brunfelsia, dracaena, grapevine, ivy, oleander and periwinkle all carry his asterisk on that list. Agapanthus has none, so on his own legend it sits outside the category he marks extremely toxic.

Two cautions about reading that page. The asterisk above his safe lists on the same page means something different — “no data but widespread usage suggests that they are safe” — so the same character carries opposite meanings in one document, which this page covers in full further down. And he puts his own lists in proportion, reporting from his clinic’s records that “despite toxic plants being common in Australian gardens, actual poisonings are rare.”

The database most Australians are sent to has never heard of it. Walking all sixty-nine index pages of the ASPCA list on 17 October 2026 and collecting every entry gives 1,024 of them, and agapanthus is not one, while sago palm, aloe, all the cordylines and the true lilies come back as expected. That absence is the one this page uses further up to keep itself honest, because the same silence covers lilly pilly.

And the MSD Veterinary Manual names it without saying anything further about it. MSD’s houseplants and ornamentals chapter lists “Agapanthus africanus (lily of the Nile)” first among what it calls common imposter lilies. The paragraph setting up that list explains why the list exists: “Many plants have ‘lily’ in the name but are not true lilies and do not pose the same toxicity concerns as true lilies. Only lilies within the Lilium and Hemerocallis families are considered true lilies and are toxic. Thus, with any lily exposure, it is important to determine whether the plant is a true lily or an imposter.” After the list the chapter moves on to cycads, and agapanthus gets no symptoms, no dose and no prognosis anywhere on the page.

That list is worth one more sentence, because it is a naming list and it is easy to read as a safety list. Convallaria majalis, lily of the valley, is on it — and the same MSD page separately files lily of the valley among the ornamentals containing cardiac glycosides, alongside oleander, foxglove and yew. Peace lily and calla lily are on the imposter list too, and both appear again in MSD’s insoluble calcium oxalate list, whose clinical signs are “immediate pain, irritation, erythema, hypersalivation, pawing at mouth, edema, lethargy, and anorexia.” Membership of the imposter list means the plant is not a true lily. It carries no promise about what else the plant might do.

The honest answer. No controlled study of agapanthus in dogs turned up, and none of those six sources carries a case report of a dog poisoned by it. What they do between them is describe a mechanism and then argue about the dose. Two of them, independently and on different continents, say the sap ulcerates a mouth. A third says minimal toxicity unless eaten in quantity. An Australian vet would rather it were out of a puppy’s reach and stops short of his extremely-toxic mark. The database Australians are usually pointed at holds nothing on it either way.

For a dog, that makes the flower stems and leaves a sore-mouth risk and the roots the part to think hardest about. Every source that breaks the plant down puts the highest concentration in the rhizome, which is also the part a digging dog reaches, and a dog that excavates a clump of agapanthus has had a different exposure from one that chewed a leaf on a walk. The signs to watch for are a painful mouth — drooling, pawing at the face, going off dinner — with vomiting or diarrhoea if any was swallowed.

Ring your vet if your dog has chewed any part of it, because a dog with a painful mouth needs looking at, and take a piece of the plant with you. Australia’s Animal Poisons Helpline is free for owners and runs 24 hours on 1300 869 738. The 13 11 26 number on the Queensland page is the human poisons line.

If a puppy is coming and you are filling a new bed, the sources with an opinion lean the same way, and there is no shortage of other things to plant.

Is bottlebrush safe for dogs?

Bottlebrush is one of the few plants on this page where every source agrees about the plant. The difficulty is entirely in the names, and there are three of them worth knowing.

The ASPCA lists it six times and clears it every time. Bottlebrush, Callistemon brachyandrus, Callistemon citrinus, Callistemon viminalis, crimson bottlebrush and weeping bottlebrush each have their own entry, and all six read non-toxic to dogs, non-toxic to cats, non-toxic to horses. The main entry gives the scientific name as Callistemon species and the family as Myrtaceae. One of the six is spelled “Crimson Bottlebush” on the ASPCA’s own page, which on a question decided entirely by spelling is worth a smile.

The Queensland Poisons Information Centre does not list it at all. Its plant index carries oleander several times over, the cycads, Macrozamia, Lepidozamia and Brunfelsia australis. Bottlebrush, callistemon, melaleuca and paperbark are all absent from it.

And Walkerville Vet has callistemon on his safe side, as the first entry in his native shrubs list. He gives no caution specific to it. The bristle at the end of a flowering spike sits at nose height for a small dog, and the caution he applies to spiny and sharp-edged plants elsewhere on that page — “especially in dogs with short faces like Pugs and Bulldogs where the eye could be damaged” — is a sensible thing to carry across, though he makes it about succulents and not about this plant.

The first name trap is a plant from the other side of the world. The ASPCA’s bottlebrush entry carries this line: “Do not confuse with Aesculus parviflora, a toxic Buckeye ‘Bottlebrush’ plant containing Aesculin.” Aesculus parviflora is a North American shrub with no relation to callistemon, and it is the bottlebrush that poisons things. The line sits in the field headed Clinical Signs, under a field headed Toxicity that reads non-toxic three times over. For a plant with no clinical signs to report there is nothing else for that slot to hold, so the placement is reasonable enough — and it does mean the one warning on the page is in the last place a worried owner would look for it.

The second trap decides whether you find an answer at all. Some references and labels use Melaleuca for this plant where others use Callistemon, and the two names land on the same crimson bottlebrush. The authorities split on which is correct. Australia’s national plant list has Callistemon citrinus as the accepted name with Melaleuca citrina as a synonym of it, and Kew’s Plants of the World Online has it the other way round, accepting Melaleuca citrina and treating Callistemon citrinus as the synonym. The ASPCA database holds no Melaleuca entry of any kind. So looking the plant up under the name on the label returns six clear answers or a blank page, depending on which name a nursery printed and which authority it followed.

The third trap is the one that matters most, and it has nothing to do with the shrub in your garden. The genus Melaleuca also holds Melaleuca alternifolia, the tea tree — and concentrated tea tree oil is one of the best-documented poisonings in Australian pets. The same MSD Veterinary Manual quoted above lists “tea tree/melaleuca” among the potentially hepatotoxic essential oils, and says twice on one page that “Tea tree oil has been the most commonly reported intoxicant in pets.” On dogs specifically: “Dogs do not have the same enzyme deficiency as cats; however, they are still at risk for toxicosis from exposure to essential oils.” MSD lists the products these oils turn up in, and includes “‘natural’ flea and tick repellents”, which is a subject this site has its own page on.

So the word melaleuca means a harmless garden shrub when it is on a plant label and a well-documented poisoning when it is on a bottle. Veterinary toxicology uses the bare genus name for the oil, which is how a reader can come away from a safe-plant list with the wrong answer about a shampoo. Worth adding that “tea tree” is itself used for at least two unrelated Australian plants — Walkerville’s own safe list has tea tree down as Leptospermum, a different genus from the Melaleuca the oil is pressed from.

The honest answer. The bottlebrush in your garden is as well covered as an Australian native gets on this page: six non-toxic entries in the database most people are sent to, no entry in the Queensland human poisons list, and the Australian vet list putting callistemon on the safe side. Nothing turned up reporting a Callistemon or Melaleuca plant harming a dog. Plant it where you like, keep an eye on the bristles around a small dog’s face, and keep the oil of its cousin away from your dog entirely.

Cordyline, and why one line on a safe list covers two answers

This one is worth following closely, because it shows how a careful list and a careful database can disagree without either being careless.

Dr Spanner’s safe list has a single line for cordyline: “Cordyline australis & rubra (others less known)”. No asterisk — on his page, that mark is reserved for the entries with no data behind them.

The ASPCA database splits that line down the middle:

Cordyline australis appears three times, under the names Palm Lily, Grass Palm and Giant Dracaena, and every one of them reads Toxic to Dogs. The toxic principle is given as saponins, and the signs as “Vomiting (occasionally with blood), depression, anorexia, hypersalivation, dilated pupils”.
Cordyline rubra appears once, as Red Palm Lily, and reads Non-Toxic to Dogs, with the toxic principle given as “Non-toxic”.

Two species on one line of a safe list, and opposite verdicts in the database. Neither source is being sloppy; they are drawing on different evidence, and a reader who only saw one of them would come away certain.

There is a second trap folded inside it. The line immediately after cordyline on Dr Spanner’s page is a warning: “Watch out for Dracaena which looks very similar to Flax or Cordyline.” Good advice — dracaena is on his extremely-toxic list. But the ASPCA’s own title for Cordyline australis is “Giant Dracaena”. Someone following the warning, looking up “dracaena” to make sure, lands on a page for the very plant they were told was fine.

If you have a cordyline and a dog that chews, the practical move is to find out which species it is before you decide anything. That applies to more plants than you would expect, which is the next section.

Names that do not mean what you think

The MSD Veterinary Manual states the rule at the top of its chapter on household and ornamental plants, and it is the single most useful sentence in this whole subject:

“Many plants that share the same common name are in different families and have different levels of toxicity. Therefore, it is important to identify not only the common name of the plant ingested, but also the scientific name. This will ensure that the patient is correctly assessed and treated.”

Four worked examples, all checked in the database directly.

Marigold

“Marigold is safe” is true and useless. The database’s marigold entries are Pot Marigold and Garden Marigold, both Calendula officinalis, and Cape Marigold, Dimorphotheca pluvialis. All non-toxic to dogs.

The marigold sold in punnets in Australian nurseries is usually Tagetes — the French and African marigolds, the ones with the smell. Tagetes does not appear anywhere in the database. The safe answer belongs to a different genus from the plant most people are holding.

Hibiscus

The database’s hibiscus entry is Hibiscus syriacus, listed with the alternative names Rose of Sharon and Rose of China, and it is non-toxic to dogs. H. syriacus is the deciduous cold-climate shrub. The hibiscus grown across the warm half of Australia is usually the tropical Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, which is a different species and is not that entry.

Plumbago

Dr Spanner recommends Plumbago auriculata, the blue-flowered hedge plant, with a nice observation attached: “dogs love exploring in these when they get straggly”. Look plumbago up in the database and you will find two entries, Chinese Plumbago and Plumbago Larpentiae — and both are Ceratostigma, a different genus altogether. Plumbago auriculata itself is absent. The apparent match is not the plant.

Bottlebrush

Here the database posts the warning itself. Its bottlebrush entries are all non-toxic to dogs, cats and horses, which agrees with Dr Spanner, and one of them carries a line about an unrelated North American plant of the same common name which is not. Two unrelated plants, one common name, opposite answers — and because a second naming problem sits behind that one, bottlebrush has a full section of its own above.

Four names, four traps, and each one is the difference between a correct answer and a confident wrong one.

The asterisk that means three different things

While checking the sources for this page I found something that explains, better than any argument, why a copied plant list degrades.

On Dr Spanner’s page, above the safe lists, the asterisk means “no data but widespread usage suggests that they are safe”. About forty lines further down, above the plants he recommends avoiding, the same page says: “Asterisks (*) mark the extremely toxic plants.” Same symbol, same article, opposite meanings. On his page it is perfectly clear, because each legend sits directly above the list it governs.

Then open the MSD Veterinary Manual’s table of important poisonous plants of Australia. Brunfelsia carries an asterisk there too. Its footnote reads: “Plants introduced to Australia (not indigenous) are indicated by an asterisk (*) preceding the scientific name.”

Three meanings — no data, extremely toxic, and not native — carried by one character across three lists that all concern plants and dogs. A person or a program copying rows out of any of them without the legend produces something that looks authoritative and says whatever the accident of the symbol decided. This is how a safe list and a toxic list end up containing the same plant.

The practical version: when a plant list marks entries with a symbol, colour or tick, find the key and read it before you trust a single row.

What “pet friendly” means on an Australian plant label

Bunnings tells readers that “Plants known to be poisonous or hazardous should be labelled accordingly”, and adds a safety tip: “Always read plant labels to check if the plant is problematic for pets.” Fair enough — so what stands behind the label?

The relevant document is the National Plant Labelling Guidelines, version 3.0, January 2023, published by Greenlife Industry Australia, the national body for the nursery and garden industry. It runs to 26 numbered pages. It is worth reading what it actually says, because it is more modest than the phrase “labelled accordingly” suggests.

It is voluntary. The guidelines were developed by the industry itself and are “recommended for adoption by all plant producers, suppliers of plant material, plant retailers and label manufacturers.” No regulator sits behind them.

Its warning section is headed “Potentially harmful plants: Consumer health”, and it works like this, in the document’s own words:

“These guidelines for labelling will ensure that the public is informed of potentially harmful plants. Plants that are known to be harmless do not require a warning. A list of potentially harmful plants can be found in Appendix 2. This list has been established as a guide only by Greenlife Industry Australia (GIA). It was developed from a combination of reputable international and local sources and contains the list of plants known to be potentially harmful. This list is restricted to potentially harmful plants that are commonly cultivated for sale.”

Look at what that does to a blank label. A warning is required only for plants on the list. Plants “known to be harmless” need no warning. So a plant with nothing on its tag is either known to be harmless or has never been assessed — and the tag cannot tell you which. That is the same gap as the database, arriving by a different route.

The list carries a disclaimer of its own: “While every effort has been made in preparing this list, Greenlife Industry Australia accepts no responsibility for any errors, omissions or inaccuracies. GIA accepts no responsibility to persons who may rely on this document, in whole or in part, for whatever purpose.”

And the document never uses the word “safe”

This is the part that matters to a dog owner. I searched the whole document. The words “pet friendly”, “pet safe” and “safe for pets” appear nowhere, and neither does the bare word “safe”, anywhere in the document.

The guidelines are also, in substance, about people. The two warning sections are headed “Consumer health” and “Environment”. The prescribed wordings in the appendix read “CAUTION Harmful if eaten” and “CAUTION Skin irritant”. The bibliography includes two sources titled Garden Plants Poisonous to People and Plants and Fungi Poisonous to People in Queensland.

Animals are not forgotten entirely. The definition of a harmful plant includes a final bullet, “potential harmful effects to animals or pets”. And there is exactly one animal-specific warning in the whole document: “Portulaca spp – CAUTION Harmful to animals if eaten”. One genus, in an appendix that runs alphabetically across the plants the industry flags.

None of which makes the retailers careless. The Bunnings guide ends on a hedge that most plant lists never bother with: “Although these plants are considered pet-friendly, it’s not a good idea to let your pet consume any plant.” And the five indoor plants it recommends — staghorn fern, bromeliad, pilea, calathea and banana — all check out as non-toxic to dogs when you look each one up by its botanical name. I checked all five.

So a “pet friendly” sticker on a punnet is the seller’s own wording. It is not an industry-defined term, it is not audited, and the industry’s own labelling standard does not contain the concept. That does not make the sticker dishonest — most of them are put there by people who mean it. It means the sticker is an opinion, and you should treat it as one.

Credit where it is due: the same GIA document tells growers that “A grower must take all reasonable steps to avoid using labels for ornamental plants which are misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive”, and defines misleading as “leading them to a wrong conclusion, creating a false impression or making false and inaccurate claims.” The standard is there. It simply has nothing to say about dogs.

One loose end worth noting: there is also a real Australian reference that both ends of this chain point at and nobody uses. Dr Ross McKenzie’s CSIRO volume, Australia’s Poisonous Plants, Fungi and Cyanobacteria: A Guide to Species of Medical and Veterinary Importance, is in the RSPCA’s list of five referrals and in the nursery industry’s own bibliography. It is the one Australian veterinary-toxicology text that appears at both ends, and it is the one nothing downstream is built from.

The herb bed, where the same list says both things

A pot of herbs by the back door is the most common planting question we get after screening shrubs, and it is a good demonstration of why a red-or-green list is worse than no list.

From the same database, for dogs:

Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) — non-toxic.
Basil (Ocimum basilicum) — non-toxic.
Thyme (Thymus vulgaris) — non-toxic.
Mint (Mentha sp.) — toxic, toxic principle given as essential oils.
Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) — toxic, toxic principle furanocoumarins.
Lavender (Lavendula angustifolia) — toxic, toxic principle linalool and linalyl acetate, signs given as nausea, vomiting and loss of appetite.

Three safe, three toxic, in one herb pot. But read the parsley entry all the way to the end, because the clinical signs field says this: “Photosensitization (sunburn, dermatitis), large amounts are needed to cause this effect”.

So parsley’s listed harm is sunburn, at large doses, and the database says so on the entry. The moment that row is compressed into a red dot on somebody’s infographic, the dose qualifier and the nature of the harm both vanish, and an owner ends up worried about a garnish.

Dr Spanner’s list includes rosemary, with a note that is its own argument for reading whole entries: “Rosemary (may attract bees and make your dog smell like a lamb roast)”.

Where the lists are harder on a plant than the evidence is

A page that only showed lists being too relaxed would be doing the same selective thing it is complaining about. These run the other way, and all four come from the sources already quoted.

Poinsettia. Listed as toxic to dogs, toxic principle “irritant sap” — and the clinical signs field ends with the ASPCA’s own verdict: “Irritating to the mouth and stomach, sometimes causing vomiting, but generally over-rated in toxicity.”
Avocado. The toxicity field reads, in its entirety, “Toxic to Horses”. The toxin is persin. The ASPCA does not list avocado as toxic to dogs, which is not what most repost-lists say about it.
Tomato plant. Listed as toxic to dogs, toxic principle solanine — and the signs field finishes with “ripe fruit is non-toxic”. The leaves and green fruit are the issue.
Aloe, poinsettia and ivy together. The MSD Veterinary Manual groups all three under “common gastrointestinal irritant plants” and writes: “Animals can generally ingest large amounts acutely or chronically nibble on leaves without severe repercussions… Prognosis with exposure to these plants is excellent.”

That last one deserves a sentence of its own, because aloe is a plant Australians grow on purpose. The ASPCA lists it as toxic to dogs — saponins and anthraquinones, with signs of vomiting, lethargy and diarrhoea, and a note that “The gel is considered edible”. Dr Spanner writes that “Succulents are also generally safe with the exception of aloe”. MSD files it among the irritants with an excellent prognosis. All three are describing the same plant accurately and answering different questions: is it listed, should you plant it, and how worried should the vet be. A dog that chews an aloe leaf is very likely to be sick and very likely to be fine.

Holding those two ideas at once is the whole skill. The lists are thinner than they look in one direction and heavier than they need to be in the other.

What the Australian veterinary literature actually says about dogs and plants

There is one properly Australian professional reference sitting underneath all of this, and almost nothing in the consumer chain draws on it.

The MSD Veterinary Manual carries a chapter called Important Poisonous Plants of Australia, reviewed in November 2023 and written by Dr Rhian B. Cope, a veterinary toxicologist at the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority — the same federal regulator that runs the register of veterinary products. Its table runs to 126 plants.

The chapter’s framing sentence is this: “Plants recorded as definitely or probably toxic to animals in Australia total > 1,000. This table includes only those plants with a notable impact.”

That figure needs handling carefully, because it is easy to misuse. It counts plants toxic to animals, and Cope’s chapter is overwhelmingly about grazing livestock — droving, drought, fire, and what he calls “hungry, tired, cold, or stressed animals” moving along stock routes. It is not a backyard document, and more than a thousand toxic Australian plants is not a statement about the risk to a dog in a suburban garden.

What it does tell you is the scale of what has been catalogued here, against the 1,024 worldwide entries in the American database that Australian shoppers are pointed to.

Eleven rows out of 126

I read the affected-animals column on every row of that table. Eleven of the 126 mention dogs, and several of those are secondary poisoning — a working dog eating meat from a poisoned animal, not a dog eating a plant. That applies to Acacia georginae, Alstonia constricta, Gastrolobium and Indigofera linnaei.

Strip those out and the plants where an Australian dog eats the plant itself come down to a very short list: the cycads (Cycas, Macrozamia and the Queensland-endemic Bowenia), Brunfelsia, macadamia, and the arum lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica).

Two of those entries are worth quoting because they are unusually direct.

On Brunfelsia, the yesterday-today-and-tomorrow shrub, the affected-animals column reads “All, but dogs are most frequently reported”, and the comments column reads: “Fruits are toxic. Dogs attracted to ripe fruits will eat large amounts.” A cultivated garden shrub whose fruit actively draws dogs in, from the professional Australian reference, and it appears near the bottom of most consumer lists if it appears at all.

On macadamia, the affected-animals column contains one word: “Dogs”. It is the only row in 126 where dogs stand alone. An Australian native tree, in Australian backyards, and most garden safety lists miss it because macadamia gets filed under food and the tree never comes up.

All four of those are worked through properly — signs, doses, what to do — on our page on plants that poison dogs in Australia, alongside white cedar, which is the other Australian tree that genuinely matters. This page will not repeat them.

The useful shape of it is this. The cycad is flagged independently by the Australian government toxicologist, by the Adelaide vet, by the ASPCA and by the emergency vet quoted in the Bunnings guide. Four sources, four methods, one plant. Where four independent lists converge, that is worth acting on — far more than the fortieth entry on a list that was copied from the thirty-ninth.

How to find out what a plant actually is

Both ends of this chain independently point to the same answer, and it is not a website.

Dr Cope, writing for the veterinary profession: “It is essential, in many cases, to confirm the identity of suspected poisonous plants by having a representative specimen carrying flowers, fruit, or both (or spores in the case of ferns) examined by a professional botanist, who may be consulted at state herbariums in Australian state capital cities.”

The nursery industry, in its own disclaimer: new species “need to be verified by authoritative institutions such as state herbariums.”

So, in order of effort:

Keep the label. The botanical name on the tag when you buy the plant is the single most useful thing you will ever have about it. Photograph it if you throw the tag away.
Use the Atlas of Living Australia for images, which Cope’s chapter recommends, and Australia’s Virtual Herbarium for distribution.
Ask your state herbarium. Every state capital has one, they identify plants for the public, and they want a specimen with flowers or fruit on it — a single leaf is rarely enough to work from.
In an emergency, skip all of that and take a piece of the plant to the vet with the dog. Identification is their problem to solve and they have better routes to it than you do.

A planting list, with the confidence marked

Here is the list this page has earned. It is shorter than the ones you will find elsewhere, because everything on it has been checked in a named source and sorted by how much that source actually knows. Nothing here is a substitute for keeping an eye on a dog that chews.

Checked, and listed as non-toxic to dogs

These appear in the ASPCA database under a botanical name I confirmed, on the non-toxic side. Several are also on Dr Spanner’s list without his no-data asterisk, which means two independent sources.

Bottlebrush — Callistemon species, including C. citrinus and the weeping bottlebrush. Both sources agree. Do not confuse with the American “bottlebrush” buckeye, and read the section above on the Melaleuca name before you buy anything with melaleuca on the label.
Camellia — Camellia japonica. Both sources.
Pittosporum tobira, sold here as Japanese pittosporum or mock orange. Both sources. Dr Spanner suggests the compact form ‘Miss Muffet’.
Star jasmine — Trachelospermum jasminoides. Both sources.
Bamboo — Phyllostachys aurea. Both sources, with Dr Spanner’s caveat that “it tends to try and take over the garden”.
Spider plant — Chlorophytum comosum. Both sources.
Red palm lily — Cordyline rubra specifically, and not C. australis.
Rosemary, basil and thyme.
Staghorn fern (Platycerium bifurcatum), bromeliad (Neoregelia), pilea, calathea and banana (Musa acuminata) — the five indoor plants Bunnings recommends. I checked all five and all five hold up.
Snapdragon — Antirrhinum majus.
Strawberry — Fragaria.

No published data, and an Australian vet’s judgement that they are fine

These carry Dr Spanner’s asterisk. His words for what that means: “no data but widespread usage suggests that they are safe”. That is a real signal and a weaker one, and this is where most of the Australian native garden sits.

Lilly pilly (Syzygium), with his warning that it ranges from a small shrub to a tree, so check the mature size before you buy.
Correa and Westringia fruticosa, the other two he names as his own favourites.
Kangaroo paw.
Clumping grasses, especially Lomandra, and sedges (Carex).
Diosma (Coleonema pulchrum).

He adds a general observation about Australian shrubs that fits this whole tier: “Many Aussie shrubs are theoretically poisonous due to the irritant oils they contain but in practice dogs find them too unpleasant to nibble.”

Tea tree (Leptospermum) sits on his safe list without an asterisk. Worth separating the plant from the bottle here: tea tree oil is a genuine hazard to dogs, particularly applied to skin, and that is a different thing from a shrub in the garden.

Checked, and worth keeping a dog away from

Cycads — sago palm, burrawang, zamia. The one that everybody agrees on, and the most dangerous plant most Australians own.
Brunfelsia, yesterday-today-and-tomorrow. Dogs go for the ripe fruit.
Oleander — cardiac glycosides, toxic to dogs, cats and horses.
Cordyline australis — saponins. Sold as palm lily, grass palm or giant dracaena.
Dracaena proper, which Dr Spanner marks as extremely toxic and which is easily mistaken for cordyline or flax.
Aloe — the one succulent Dr Spanner excepts, and toxic to dogs in the database. Expect vomiting and diarrhoea, with a good prognosis.
Hydrangea and nandina (sacred or heavenly bamboo) — both cyanogenic glycosides.
Agapanthus — on Dr Spanner’s avoid list, absent from the database entirely, and called toxic to dogs by a veterinary school’s teaching garden. The full answer is in its own section above.
Peace lily (Spathiphyllum) and jade plant (Crassula argentea) indoors.
Mint, parsley and lavender in the herb bed, on the understanding that these are the mild end of the list.

Names to pin down before you decide anything

Marigold — the safe entries are Calendula and Dimorphotheca. Tagetes, the punnet marigold, is unassessed.
Hibiscus — the safe entry is H. syriacus, not the tropical H. rosa-sinensis grown across most of Australia.
Plumbago — the database entries are Ceratostigma. Plumbago auriculata, the one in Australian gardens, is unassessed.
Cordyline — rubra and australis have opposite verdicts.
“Lily” — true lilies are Lilium and Hemerocallis only, and the danger there is overwhelmingly to cats. Arum lily, peace lily, agapanthus and clivia are unrelated plants with unrelated problems.

The short version

There is no list of plants tested and found safe for dogs. The major databases are compilations of reported poisoning cases. The ASPCA says so in its own scope note: the list contains plants “reported as having” effects, and is “not meant to be all-inclusive”.
Lilly pilly has never been assessed. It is absent from the ASPCA database, and the one Australian vet who lists it marks it “no data”. Bunnings recommends it as the swap for oleander, which is a sensible horticultural suggestion resting on no veterinary evidence either way.
Most of the Australian native garden is missing from the database — grevillea, banksia, wattle, melaleuca, westringia, correa, lomandra, dianella, kangaroo paw, pigface. So is agapanthus, which an Australian vet tells you to avoid and a veterinary school calls toxic to dogs. The silence runs both ways.
Get the botanical name. Marigold, hibiscus, plumbago and bottlebrush each cover more than one plant, and the reassuring answer usually belongs to the species you do not have. With bottlebrush the same plant also carries two accepted botanical names, and one of them is the name of a documented pet poisoning in oil form.
Cordyline australis is listed toxic to dogs and Cordyline rubra is listed non-toxic, and they sit on one line of the same safe list. The database’s name for C. australis is “Giant Dracaena”, which is also the name of the plant you were told to avoid.
Read the legend before you trust a symbol. One asterisk means “no data, probably fine” on one list, “extremely toxic” forty lines further down the same page, and “not native to Australia” in the MSD manual.
“Pet friendly” on a label is the seller’s wording. The Australian nursery industry’s labelling guidelines are voluntary, are headed “Consumer health”, carry exactly one animal-specific warning in the whole document, and never use the word “safe”.
The lists overstate as well as understate. The ASPCA calls poinsettia “generally over-rated in toxicity”, lists avocado as toxic to horses only, and notes that ripe tomato fruit is non-toxic. MSD groups aloe, poinsettia and ivy together with a prognosis of “excellent”.
Where four independent sources agree, act on it. Cycads are flagged by the APVMA toxicologist, the Adelaide vet, the ASPCA and the emergency vet quoted by Bunnings. That convergence is worth more than any long list.
Your state herbarium will identify a plant for you, and both the veterinary and the nursery sources point there. Take a piece with flowers or fruit on it. In an emergency, take it to the vet instead, along with the dog.

Sources

This page is general information, not veterinary advice, and it cannot tell you whether a particular plant in your garden is safe for your particular dog. If you think your dog has eaten something, contact a veterinarian or the Animal Poisons Helpline immediately — and go rather than reading further.

Dog Safe Plants in Australia — What the Lists Actually Know