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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