Native Flowers of October

This post is going to be mainly about the native flowers which have come into flower in this month.  Or, should I say, which we have noticed and/or photographed for the first time.
A hillside of Leucopogon fletcheri

The first violet (Viola betonicifolia)
But wait, there's more violets!
The next image is of some twining glycine.  Note the three leaflets in each leaf: this is a feature to distinguish it from Hovea.  This plant was particularly vigorous: most of the time it is twining along close to the ground, whereas this lot was up to 1.5m  up is support plant.
Glycine clandenista
Ajuga australis
Yam Daisy (Microseris sp.)
As well as the 2 species of Leucopogon (fletcheri and virgatus) another white heath has appeared.  This is Brachyloma daphnoides or Daphne Heath.
Brachyloma daphnoides
The next image is of Pultenaea procumbens one of the many 'peas'.
Closely followed by Daviesia mimosoides the ultimate egg and bacon plant.
This is also a 'fireweed' since it forms a dense under-storey and burns fiercely.  Unfortunately the fires also assist in germinating the seeds, so a controlled burn (excuse the oxymoron) merely generates an additional fuel load into the future.  Fortunately we don't have much of this.

The next is a nice daisy, Vittadinnia mullerii.  I have juggled parts of two photos to show the flower and inset the foliage.

The next image is of Hardenbergia australis.  This has been around for months but Frances noted this lot going for a world climbing record so it has been recorded.

The Bulbine Lilies arestarting to hit their straps, particularly in the Top paddock.
The middle paddock has a nice swampy bit with a watercourse leading to a small, and frequently over-full dam.  This generated a lot of sundews, which after several weeks of vegetative growth were kindly generous enough to put out some flowers.
Nearby was a Lomandra filiformis.  In vegetative mode this is a very reedy looking plant and not that appealing to the eye.  When a flower is encountered however they are very attractive at close range.
Some more yellow things are beginning to happen.  On 24 October I took images of Hibbertia obtusifolia (the Grey Guinea flower) and  Corinidium scorpioides, an everlasting daisy.

The Corinidium is an example of the darker side of the forces of evil (aka taxonomists) at work.  As far as I can establish Corinidium means "little club" which is no help whatsoever in identifying the plant.  On the other hand the previous generic name 'Helichrysum' resolves to yellow sun which is a pretty good description.

A highlight of 24 October was the first flowering of Kunzea parvifolia, which is far less common here than its relative Kunzea ericoides which typically flowers in December.  
While many parts of the day were yellow (see species above, plus Diuris) both of the non-orchids I photographed today turned out to be variations on the theme of purple.  The second is Indigofera australis.
This is Leptorhyncus squamatus: Scaly buttons.  When a few more of the yellow daisy looking plants have come out I will do a comparative page whenI get time.  Do not hold your breath!







Comments

Unknown said…
nice picture, thank you.

Where is home?
2 October 2010 at 02:24:00 GMT+10
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more