Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Generally, when Australian humans think of bees, they are thinking of Apis mellifera, the so-called “western” – or “European” – honey bee.
When Australian humans venture outdoors, Apis mellifera is the only bee species that most of them ever notice and/or recognise.
Australia has an estimated two thousand native bee species; circa 1,600 of them have been identified.
Around 800 identified species live in Western Australia; many of them live only in some part/s of Western Australia.
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After taking the photo featured in #14 in this series, my beloved and I decided to scramble our way up to the path that followed a ridge line, rather than retrace our steps along the gorge’s floor
This proved surprisingly easy.
Less than ten minutes later we were heading back to Ormiston HQ, via a well-made pathway that gave us easy access to the lookout from which I took the image featured in this series’ first chapter.
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On the afternoon of 26 August 2023 Shenton Bushland was already very colourful, although “peak Springtime flowering” was probably still a few weeks away.
None of this post’s flowers are hard to find at this time of year, providing you are in the right kind of place, within southwest Western Australia.
Shenton Bushland is one of several “right kinds of place” that are less than 20 minutes away from Perth’s CBD.
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Perth’s Kings Park is really three parks in one… plus “lookouts”.
The “lookouts” offer sweeping views from the rim of the scarp on Kings Park’s eastern and southern sides.
Looking east, they flatter the adjacent CBD, and look across the Swan Coastal Plain to the Darling Scarp.
Looking south, they show the full splendour of the Swan-Canning estuary, around which Perth’s wealthier suburbs sit.
If you walk (or catch a free bus) from the CBD – or West Perth – into Kings Park, the loveliness of its manicured, “picnic-friendly”, well-treed, grassed parkland is immediately obvious, as you can see in the featured image, above.
Every pleasant, sunny weekend, thousands of people take advantage of Kings Park’s generous supply of that kind of parkland.
However, what makes Kings Park so very special are its two other kinds of “park”: a superb botanical garden (which showcases WA’s extraordinary flora, conducts internationally significant research, and provides useful information to the general public) and its astonishingly expansive, essentially “natural” bush/woodland section.
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The moment I saw this exuberantly “bird-ready” example of Western Australia’s floral emblem, I suddenly remembered one of my favourite Australian poems.
Les Murray (1938 – 2019) never became a Nobel Laureate.
Depending on my mood, I find that fact “puzzling” (at his best, Murray was so very obviously – for much of his adult life – one of the greater 20th century poets) or “utterly predictable”. (his verse was so overtly Australian, and his views were not always “palatable”)
The Quality of Sprawl’s opening verse:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
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Some arid Australian plants are flamboyant, immediately arresting, intensely colourful.
However, to a hasty, inattentive human, not a few of them look “plain”, “drab”, barely-there.
Rich rewards await the more attentive: if you stop, and “zoom in”, you will discover that many such plants are exquisitely structured and their colour palette is much richer, and/or more variegated, than was initially apparent.
The petite, pictured example is probably a member of the genus Ptilotus; the name refers to their flowers’ “hairy” appearance.
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The shutter clicks which yielded this and the immediately preceding post’s images were less than one minute apart.
In the interim, my feet had taken very few steps.
Central Australia often reminds attentive visitors that whenever they pause to admire a splendid landscape they ought also look down at whatever is just in front of their feet!
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You are looking at a member of the genus Trichosanthes, blooming in one of south India’s Sholas – high altitude forests which “punctuate” cooler, wetter parts of the Western Ghats.
Circa 2000 metres above sea level, this vine was discreetly thriving in a very small, very special national park.
Eventually, Kerala’s Pampadum Shola National Park will have its own multi-image post.
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Each of the headline’s descriptors applies to one or more of this post’s species – all blooming a deal less than a kilometre away from both a large shopping centre and one of Perth’s arterial roads.
For just about any “exceptional”, “extreme”, or “weird” form of flowering plant behaviour, southwestern Australia is the global hotspot.
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