For years after a road trip that Scott and I did in Western Australia back in 2016, I’d wanted to return. I was totally blown away by the plants, scenery, animals and open spaces.
This time since the planning and driving was somewhat difficult we decided to take a tour focused on wildflowers. We especially wanted to visit Geraldton to see where the Waxflowers, Chamelaucium, and the wreathflowers, Lechenaultia macrantha, grow wild. We also stopped at several other areas with wildflowers, but were someone disappointed some days when visited some mediocre private gardens, a cave, a winery and even a truffle farm which had few Australian plants, It was a lot of travel and expense to see things that weren’t Australian.
My traveling companion, Kathy Asher, and I had arrived 2 days before the tour to have time to spend in Perth and time change with Western Australia being 15 hours ahead of after 21 hours of travel time. My partner, Scott Borden, joined us 2 days later. Our first stop was a pocket of protected the western Australia bush growing in a residential neighborhood of Perth overlooking Lucky Bay.
I had learned of Wireless Park by following several Australian based groups on Facebook.Upon existing our UBER we were greeted by a group of loud and boisterous Magpies
Not really knowing which direction to go we started wandering along what looked like trails through the bush. We quickly found some unusual endemic plants. Most notable was the red and green kangaroo paw – which is the floral emblem of Western Australia, a brightly colored pea bush and an sharp-leaved nearly white small-flowered Banksia.
Anigozanthos manglesii
Kathy quickily focused in finding Banksias. She grows many in her home garden in the Claremont neighborhood of San Diego.
Banksia seed pods center and right. Banksias hold their seed in persistent cones on the plant. Some species only release the seed after a fire.
It was at this location that we encountered our first grass trees, Xanthorrhoea. At the time, we didn’t realize that the small ones we saw in bloom were unusual for the season, and we only spotted a few others. Throughout Australia, we would come across these trees frequently, with around 30 different species existing, though to my untrained eye, they all appeared similar. These trees grow extremely slow, typically less than 3 inches per year. A plant reaching 5 feet in height is likely several hundred years old. The plants we observed here still retained their ‘skirts’, but many others had lost theirs due to wildfires, leaving behind a blackened trunk.
In the understory, there was a charming little plant with yellow flowers, Conostylis aculeata. Native only to Western Australia, we encountered it frequently during our trip. It belongs to the same family, Haemodoraceae, as the well-known Kangaroo Paw.
Another intriguing plant is the Drosera, commonly known as sundew. These carnivorous plants feature sticky extensions on their leaves that capture and digest insects. They typically thrive in nutrient-poor soils and rely on an insect diet to obtain minerals absent in the soil. There are nearly 200 species of sundews, with the majority found in the southwestern corner of Western Australia.
These two vibrant plants, native to southwestern Australia, were observed in numerous other wild locations we explored.
Up next:
Kings Park, The Royal Botanic Garden in Perth – Nirvana to an Australian plantaholic.