Picking the neighbours’ flowers

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garden flowers

It’s daybreak. A woman leaves her house stealthily, flower camera slung around her neck. Shapes disentangle themselves from the dimness and bound off as she approaches. There is no one around, not even any lights on yet. Perfect for stealing images she wouldn’t dare appropriate in full daylight on the crowded streets of Potato Point. She shows some restraint. She might lean over the fence line, but she never trespasses beyond the boundary. And what a bouquet she collects! Flowers she’d never grow herself, but why bother, when someone else does it for her?

I suspect the inspiration for these flower-thefts might have been DJ’s Brunswick series.

Discovery of the week: Bolwarra flowers

Tags

bolwarra, Eupomatia laurena

It's a long time since I've poked around in my front yard which is full of sandflies, ticks and mosquitoes: or at least that's my excuse. I was prompted by the need to spray knee-high grass. I found two dead trees, and another challenged one, and while I was being sand-flied around the ankles I noticed that the bolwarra was flowering, something I had never seen before.

The bolwarra (its Aboriginal name, meaning either “high”, or “flash of light”, or who knows what?) is a rainforest tree with an ancient lineage. This one's been in my front yard since the rainforest makeover about ten years ago. Its common names are native guava or copper laurel: I'm a fan of common names because they aren't subject to the name changes brought about by taxonomy wars. In this case they hint at its edibility – the sweet, aromatic fruit can be used as a spice-fruit in beverages, jams and desserts; and at the botanical name, Eupomatia laurena.

The flowers have a distinctive ether-like perfume (I've heard it called sewer-like) and each one only lasts a day. They are pollinated by small brown weevils – I spotted one in action, but the camera didn't: a rare occasion when I saw more than the lens.

 

 

 

 

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Flowers on the volcano trail

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clematis, correa, grevillea, mallee

The spring flowering has pretty-well finished, but there are still treasures to see, the most spectacular the mallee flowers and gum nuts, both of luxuriant size and formation. But there were also white correa, grevilleas, clematis tendrils, pods and ferns, and the occasional unknown and feral.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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More spring flowers

Tags

bangalay flower and fruit, Bingie Dreaming Track, boronia, donkey orchid, goodenia, lilac lily, purple flag

Our coast walk last weekend yielded a new array of bush flowers, as we rambled along a a stretch of the Bingie Dreaming Track from Congo to Meringo. Some of them were in heath; some along a sandy bush track; some on an exposed headland; some on the beach.

 

Beach dandelion

?: ?: ?: donkey orchid

Lomandra: Goodenia: ?: ?

Blossom and nuts of the bangalay (?)

,

?: purple flag: fringe lily: lilac lily

Boronia (?)

 

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More Eurobodalla plant life

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appleberry, boobialla, casuarina, hakea, lichen, mangroves, pittosporum

Some more growing things from my neck of the woods, mostly tiny but not trifling. You’ll have seen a few before, so this is revision! I’ve also begun to pay a bit of attention to habit, so there are some photos that show what previously encountered flowers are attached to. Some of the photos (the male flower-spikes of the casuarina, the devils of the hakea, the berries of the boobialla) are different manifestations of plants I’ve already introduced you to.

The triumph of this collection, though, are the flowers of the mangrove. J spotted them between the road and the inlet, as we were returning home from time travel to the late Cambrian at Shelly Beach.

The habit and flourishing of Daviesia ulicifolia

More large-leafed bush pea for Tish

Glycine vine (?)

Billardiera scandens: appleberry

Male flower spikes of casuarina: Hibbertia – flowers, bush and buds

Hakea: beaked fruit (aka devils)

Flowers of native grasses: Lomandra longifolia and Lomandra multiflora

Lichen on ancient rocks

Boobialla berries and fading pittosporum flowers

Flowering grey mangroves: Avicennia marina variety australasica

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Not hosts of golden daffodils

Tags

leaf skeleton, moss, purple / blue flowers, white flowers

One of my blogging friends, Tish, understood the nature of many Australian wildflowers when she said, in a comment on my last flower post “We’re not talking in-your-face ‘hosts of golden daffodils’ here. I suspect you have to do a bit of sleuthing and keeping your eyes peeled to come on all these lovely plants.” She was right. Many of the flowers featured in this post are tiny, and I need to keep my eyes slowly swivelling to spot them. Fortunately my default walking mode is slow: if I jogged I would see nothing.

This early morning flower walk began with a couple of macropods and their joeys, one with tail and paws dangling out of the pouch, ears finding a space around them; one watching me from the pouch with alert eyes. Then a movement in the bush turned into an emu, who took off in a hysterical ungainly leap when (s)he saw me.

The predominant flower colour on the headland in late September is white: creamy candles now taking on a cylindrical look; a flourishing of white flowers emerging from grass-like leaves under the twisted spotted gums; tiny many-petalled flowers in profusion on the ground; the hairy white flowers of the boobialla, berries not yet rich purple. A couple of bluey-purple Solanums offered a change of colour. Then there was a miscellanea of banksia cones, male toothed casuarina needles, curled monotoca leaves, the beginning of wattle pods, a madly budding and sunny-flowering hibbertia, and the exquisite filigree of a leaf skeleton.

The photographic triumph of the morning came towards the end of the walk. At last I've almost captured with clarity the miniature forest that is the flowering of moss. It was worth lying flat on the ground amongst potential leeches and ticks to capture the minute green cylindrical bobbles on slender red stems.

 

 

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More Eurobodalla spring

Tags

lichen, orchids, seed pods, wildflowers

Glossodia major: waxlip orchid

 

Monotoca elliptica: tree broom-heath

Eucalypt leaves

Fungus and grass

Pultenaea daphnoides: large-leafed bush pea

Correa alba: white correa

Sandflower

Commersonia fraseri: brush kurrajong

? Escapee geranium?

Hibbertia scandens: snake vine; climbing guinea vine

No ID

Everlasting paper daisy

Wattle pods

lichen

Hakea salicifolia (?)

Glossodia major: waxlip orchid

Daviesia ulicifolia: gorse bitter pea

Melaleuca ericifolia (?): swamp paperbark

Melaleuca ericifolia (?): swamp paperbark

Casuarina littoralis : black she-oak

Casuarina littoralis (?) : black she-oak

Casuarina littoralis (?) : black she-oak

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Gilgandra Flora Reserve

Tags

blue fingers, Gilgandra Flora Reserve, grass trees, rehabilitating the land

 

Gilgandra Flora Reserve is another of our waystations or places of pilgrimage. We last visited it in January, and even at the height of summer it provided delights. This time we expected to see some early spring flowerings, and we allowed ourselves plenty of time for a ramble in this piece of rehabilitated natural bushland, 8.5 hectares, managed by local volunteers, and donated by local farmers. We weren’t disappointed. Although I have just been mightily disappointed because a search of my no-fail filing system has refused to turn up the species list I know I have.

I love walking into the reserve off the dirt road and seeing the spires of native cypresses, so different from eucalypt shapes. But before that pleasure we had something to puzzle over: mounds of red dirt around holes burrowed down into the soil. Best guess at the makers was burrowing frogs, drawn out by recent rain.

Corrigendum by comment: Not a frog, a beetle, a Scarabaeidae in the subfamily Bolboceratinae. Thank you, Allen Sundholm.

 

 

 

Before I was even through the gate, J was calling me. He’d obviously found something he was scared he would lose if he moved on. That proved to be a false assumption, because the Blue fingers were everywhere, in clusters and alone. In fact you had to watch your feet very carefully so you didn’t trample them. Indulge me in an excess of orchid photos, please.

 

 

There were many other delights. A reddish pink cover on the ground proved to be a plant, rather than the pebbles I thought it was; trunks were varied; leaf-and-bark litter coiled and striated, host to bone, moth case and hardenbergia; mosses collected leaves, bark and seeds.

 

 

There were flowers too: wattle; difficult-to-photograph grevillea (I’ve summoned the painterly effect to disguise blur); pink phlebalium, erupting from its buds; and of course the unidentifiable one, white, with grass like leaves, a lily maybe.

 

 

Finally, the signature plant of the reserve, graceful grass trees, one of the thirty or so Xanthorrhea species in Australia.

 

 

I’d like to share this walk with Jo’s Monday walkers: a taste of Australian landscape and flora.

 

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By the road and near the library

Tags

leaves, reflections

 

 

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A gallery of paper daisies

Tags

Nerrigundah, paper daisies

The road from Nerrigundah village to the cemetery was blazing with golden everlastings (Bracteantha bracteata I think). Every single flower demanded to be photographed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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