Esperance

I’m not going to say a lot in this post about Esperance, I was only there for a few days, some of that time I spent preparing for my trip across the nullabor and the rest of the time I was driving around taking photos. Although Esperance has magnificent beaches, the thing that impressed me most during my stay was Helms arboretum, about 15kms north of Esperance.

So here’s a bit of the magnificent coastline.

 

The bluest blues and the whitest white beaches, most people are impressed by it, and I should have been as well. Perhaps I was just annoyed at the fact that there didn’t seem to be any shells, anywhere, I walked for miles along the different beaches, specifically looking along ones with more rocks and reef, yet nothing. Oh well, Esperance does have nice beaches.

It looks like a pile of gem stones when you blow it up, and notice that there’s almost always some purple grains in the sand, I’ve found this in most sand photos I’ve taken.

An arboretum is a botanic garden devoted to trees, and Helms arboretum near Esperance is a fantastic place to spend a few hours. There are hundreds of tree and shrub species planted out in a large block or grid layout and gravel tracks lead you weaving throughout the massive area.

The collection of trees and shrubs are predominantly Australian and the idea was to find out what plants grew well in the soils of the area so that farmers could take advantage of growing them.

The colours in the barks on the trees when I visited were quite stunning.

And there were some interesting flowers as well, though not many at this time of year.

I wonder if it’s where they get some of the ideas for camouflage patterns.

Yes the barks, the variety in the barks, the patterns and the colours, that’s what really did it for me on the day.

 

These last few are all exactly the same species Eucalyptus spathulata, yet they look so different, it’s hard to believe it’s the same species of tree.

And we end with this poor specimen, what a hard life it’s had, the whole tree seems to have been tortured, with huge gaping wounds up and down it’s trunk. These extended all the way around the tree as well.