Orchid season has been rather busy and I’ve been trying to capture as much as I can, traveling all over the south west of Western Australia as the season progresses.
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The 2022 orchid season kicks off with the first ones to emerge here in W.A. The leafless orchid, the white bunnies and hare orchids. Although slipper orchids have been around for months during the warmer weather, you can see this is the beginnings of orchids for the year, there are flowers of a few and there are new leaves emerging.
After many years I decided it was time for a camera update. So I caught the bus up to Perth and scored myself a brand new Nixon Z5 camera and a 105mm macro lens to suit. This is quite a step up from my old Nikon D5500 in a couple of ways, firstly it has a full frame sensor, which means that it takes clearer pictures in lower light, which is one of the main reasons I sprung the extra money to take this step up, better quality pictures. Depending on my operation of course.
Every now and then I come across an orchid that may not be the most beautiful, but it triggers something in me, something that once I see it, well it just won’t go away. Say hello to the common white bunny orchid, Eriochilus dilatatus subsp. multiflorus, or as I like to call it, the angry baby bird orchid.
This is a post filled with pictures just messing around with some Drossera plants. It started as a wet day, but then I added to things by using a squirty bottle to add extra water to the plants and the results were really interesting. Little upside down images of sky, the red dirt road and bush in each water droplet.
There aren’t many orchids around the Ravensthorpe/Esperance area though there are a lot of Sun orchids. I spent 2 days in Helm’s arboretum and saw many thousands of blue sun orchids, now according to the orchid book there are only 9 different species of blue sun orchids in W.A. and perhaps only 2 species which could possibly be where I was, but the variety I found in both colour and form across the arboretum was stunning.
As the orchids have petered out traveling further east I’ve started looking at other plants and flowers. This image above may look like a boring little everlasting type flower but it’s when you look closer at numerous individual flowers and think about them, study them, that it starts to get interesting. This flower is like a little multi rocket launcher, rocket tubes opening up from the centre and the individual flowers begin to unfurl twisting their way up out of their launch tubes.
Starting to get towards the end of my orchid adventures for 2021. As I’ve moved further east the orchids have been thinning out and they are getting harder to find in these lower rainfall areas. I still have quite a few photos from the last week or two to post though here I’m going to concentrate on clowns, Caladenia roei.