Australian Native Plants Toxic to Dogs: The Honest List

If your dog has eaten part of a plant, ring your vet now — do not wait to see whether it gets sick. With the worst of these, by the time a dog looks unwell the damage is already being done. Take a piece of the plant with you. Australia also has a 24/7 Animal Poisons Helpline on 1300 869 738, staffed by poisons consultants; consultations start at $75.

People search for “Australian native plants toxic to dogs” and find long lists — forty, fifty species, wattles and grevilleas and eucalypts, every one flagged as dangerous. Those lists are mostly copied from each other, and they are mostly theoretical.

Dr Andrew Spanner, an Adelaide veterinarian who has written more carefully about this than most, puts it plainly: “Many Aussie shrubs are theoretically poisonous due to the irritant oils they contain but in practice dogs find them too unpleasant to nibble.”

That is the honest answer, and it is worth more than another list. A handful of Australian natives will genuinely hurt your dog, and three of them are worth knowing by sight. A rather larger number of introduced garden plants will. And the things that actually put Australian dogs in emergency hospitals are mostly not plants at all.

This page covers all three, in that order.

The three things most likely to save your dog

Know whether you have a cycad or a white cedar. If there is a burrawang, a zamia or a sago palm in your yard, that is the single most dangerous plant you own — one seed can kill a dog. A white cedar dropping berries on the lawn is the other one to identify.
Do not wait for symptoms. Liver damage from a cycad and seizures from Brunfelsia both begin before a dog looks obviously unwell. The Animal Poisons Helpline’s standing advice is to call “even if your pet looks well”.
Lock up the snail bait. It kills more Australian dogs than any native plant, and the “pet-friendly” label on the box does not mean what people think it means.

The natives that genuinely matter

Cycads — burrawang, zamia, and the introduced sago palm

This is the one. If you take nothing else from this page, take this.

Australia has native cycads — Macrozamia communis, the burrawang, common through coastal New South Wales, the pineapple zamia (Lepidozamia peroffskyana) through northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland, and the zamia palm (Macrozamia riedlei) around Perth and the south-west. Gardens across the country also grow the introduced sago palm, Cycas revoluta. Botanically they differ. To a dog’s liver they do not.

All parts are toxic — fronds, trunk, roots — but the large seeds carry the most toxin, and they drop where dogs find them.
Australia’s Animal Poisons Helpline states that “ingestion of even one seed can result in severe poisoning or death”.
The toxin, cycasin, is converted in the gut and attacks the liver. There is no antidote.
Signs include vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, drowsiness and weakness, progressing to jaundice, bruising, seizures and liver failure.
In some published case series the survival rate is as low as 50%. Larger and more recent series are more encouraging — one of 130 dogs reported survival closer to 88% — and the single biggest factor in those better numbers is early decontamination, before the toxin has been absorbed.

That spread is the argument for going immediately rather than waiting. The dogs in the good statistics are the ones who got to a vet early. If you have a dog and a cycad, the helpline’s own suggestion is to consider removing it, or at minimum fencing the dog away from it — and collecting the seeds as they fall.

White cedar (Cape lilac)

Melia azedarach is native to Australia — its natural range runs from around Cooktown down to the New South Wales south coast — and it has been planted as a street and shade tree so widely that it now grows in every state and territory. Most people know it as Cape lilac or the white cedar, and most people have walked past one this week.

The berries are the problem, and they contain meliatoxins. They are reported to be sweet and highly palatable, which is exactly the wrong combination for a scavenging dog.
Poisoning starts with drooling, vomiting and diarrhoea, progresses to weakness and difficulty walking, and in bad cases to seizures and paralysis.
There is no antidote, but the Animal Poisons Helpline is clear that “early veterinary treatment can be lifesaving”.
The toxin content varies enormously between individual trees. This is the detail that catches people: a dog that ate berries from the tree down the road and was fine tells you nothing about the tree in your own yard.

Practical advice from the helpline is simply not to let a scavenging dog snuffle about directly under one. Berries drop in autumn and hang on bare branches through winter, so this is not only a spring problem.

Macadamia

One of Australia’s best-known native food crops is genuinely toxic to dogs, and a great many south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales backyards have a tree dropping nuts onto the lawn.

Signs appear at doses as low as about 2 grams per kilogram — for a 10 kg dog, somewhere around six to ten nuts.
Signs usually appear within 3 to 12 hours, occasionally later: weakness, particularly in the back legs, wobbliness, tremors, vomiting, and sometimes a fever.
The hind-leg weakness frightens owners badly, and understandably — it looks like the early stage of tick paralysis. It is not, but you cannot tell them apart at home, which is its own reason to go.
Most dogs recover within 24 to 48 hours, often with nothing more than observation, and deaths from macadamia alone have not been reported. This one is frightening rather than deadly — which is worth knowing while you are in the waiting room.

Worth knowing: macadamias often arrive at Christmas coated in chocolate, in a house full of other things a dog should not eat. The combination is worse than the nut alone. The Christmas page works through the whole table, in grams.

Eucalyptus — the oil, not the tree

Dogs living under gum trees are not being poisoned by them. Eucalyptus oil is a different matter: concentrated, readily available in every Australian supermarket, and genuinely toxic if a dog drinks it or if it is applied to the skin. The same applies to tea tree oil.

This is the practical form of the “native plants are toxic” worry — not the tree in the yard, the bottle in the cupboard, usually poured on a dog by a well-meaning owner treating something else.

The introduced plants that do the real damage

Here is the uncomfortable part of the answer. Most of the plants that generate calls to Australia’s animal poisons service are introduced ornamentals — brought here to be pretty, and rather better at hurting a dog than the bush is.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow (Brunfelsia)

The shrub with purple flowers that fade to white over three days, in a great many older Australian gardens, flowering right now in spring. It is South American, and it is the plant Australian emergency vets talk about most.

All parts should be considered highly poisonous, especially the berries.
Signs usually appear within a couple of hours — drooling, vomiting, diarrhoea, often with berries visible in it, and a distinctive coughing or sneezing — but onset can be much more delayed. A dog that still looks well at three hours has not cleared it.
It progresses to agitation, difficulty walking, tremors and seizures, with effects on heart rate and blood pressure.
The helpline’s position is unambiguous: “Any ingestion of this plant should be considered life-threatening.”

The rest of the serious list

Oleander — affects the heart, dangerous in very small amounts, common in median strips and old gardens.
Lantana — a declared weed across much of eastern Australia, damages the liver.
True lilies (Lilium, Hemerocallis) — a genuine emergency for cats, where even pollen or vase water can cause kidney failure. Mostly a stomach upset in dogs, but if you have both animals this matters a great deal.
Glory lily and lily of the valley — not true lilies, and a different problem entirely. Glory lily (Gloriosa) contains colchicine and can cause organ damage and death in dogs; lily of the valley affects the heart. Do not file these under “less dangerous to dogs”.
Autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale) — despite the name, another colchicine plant in the same serious class, not a garden-variety bulb.
Azaleas and rhododendrons — grayanotoxins, which affect the heart. Extremely common in cooler-climate Australian gardens.
Agapanthus — in nearly every second Australian front yard, and a regular cause of mouth irritation and gut upset.
Spring bulbs — daffodils, jonquils, tulips. The bulb is the toxic part, and a dog that digs is the dog at risk.
Indoor plants — devil’s ivy, philodendron, peace lily, dieffenbachia, dracaena, jade plant. Mostly mouth and gut irritation rather than organ damage, but they generate a lot of calls.

What actually poisons dogs in Australian gardens

Plant poisonings happen. They are not what fills emergency hospitals. Dr Spanner ranks the real garden threats like this:

Rat and mouse baits
Mushrooms and toadstools
Pesticides
Fertiliser
Compost

His point about them is the useful one: “Compared to plants, it’s actually quite easy to prevent dogs getting to these, and well worth the effort.” You cannot dig up every shrub. You can put the bait box somewhere the dog cannot reach.

Snail bait, and the “pet-friendly” label

A wet Australian spring means snails, which means snail bait goes down in gardens across the country in exactly the season this article is published.

Three kinds are sold here — metaldehyde, methiocarb and iron-based. Metaldehyde is the classic killer, causing tremors, seizures, dangerously high body temperature and death. Some products carry a bittering agent and some are marketed as pet friendly.

The Animal Poisons Helpline’s verdict on that marketing deserves quoting in full: “In our experience these bittering agents do not stop curious dogs and whilst some snail baits are considered safer than others, it is important to note that a large ingestion of any of these products may result in life-threatening poisoning.”

Iron-based baits are the safer option, not a safe one. If you have a dog, the genuinely safe move is beer traps, copper tape, or picking the snails off by torchlight like your grandmother did.

Mushrooms and compost

Both are spring and summer problems, both appear overnight after rain, and both are easy to miss. In its first six months of operation in 2020, just over a quarter of the calls to the Australian Animal Poisons Centre were about mushrooms and toadstools. Compost heaps grow moulds that produce tremorgenic toxins — a dog that raids the compost and comes back shaking is a genuine emergency, not a dog that ate something off.

Walk the lawn after rain. It takes a minute and it is the same habit as a daily tick search. If you live anywhere from northern New South Wales up and across the top, that same walk is when you will find cane toads, which appear in numbers after the first warm downpour.

If your dog eats something

Take the plant with you — a piece with leaves, flowers or seeds. Identification changes treatment, and a photo on a phone is second best.
Ring ahead, to your vet or to the Animal Poisons Helpline on 1300 869 738. It runs 24 hours; consultations start at $75.
Do not make your dog vomit unless a vet has told you to. With some substances it causes more damage coming back up, and salt water — the old remedy — is dangerous in its own right.
Go, even if the dog seems fine. For cycads especially, looking well early means nothing at all.

Natives that are fine to plant

Since the premise of most of these lists is that you should rip out your garden, it is worth ending on the other side of it. Australian natives commonly recommended as safe around dogs include lilly pilly, callistemon (bottlebrush), westringia, correa, lomandra, along with camellias and true ferns. Those recommendations are not all equally well founded — bottlebrush and camellia are listed as non-toxic in the ASPCA database, while lilly pilly, westringia and correa have never been assessed at all. Our page on dog safe plants in Australia works through where each of those verdicts comes from, and gives a planting list with the confidence marked on every entry. One caution on that last point: asparagus “fern” is neither a fern nor safe — it is a declared weed in much of Australia and its berries are toxic.

You can have an Australian native garden and a dog. For the overwhelming majority of natives, the risk is theoretical and the dog is not interested. Spend the worry on the cycad, the Brunfelsia and the snail bait instead — that is where it is earned.

Sources

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

Australian Native Plants Toxic to Dogs — and the Garden Things That Actually Poison Them