Perenjori

Perenjori is a pretty hot, dry and desolate place, well at least I think it is anyway, it’s 350 km north of Perth on the edge of the wheat-belt area of Western Australia. Any further northeast just isn’t viable for cropping of any kind and it’s easy to know that it’s the edge of the grain growing regions because of this… 

The rabbit proof fence, also known as the vermin proof fence or the state barrier fence, there are three of these in total, but the largest, fence number one which I visited is the main fence running from the top of state to the very bottom and at over 1800km long when it was completed in 1907 it was the longest continuous fence in the world.  All hand built often often using local timbers for fence posts spaced at 12 feet apart and the wire netting is buried at least 6 inches deep. What a job that must have been, some of the ground out here is literally like rock and must have been terrible to dig.

Many sections of the fence needed to be replaced because they had used wood that was attacked by termites. Thirty people worked full time inspecting the fence, riding up and down making repairs where necessary and initially they rode bicycles which seems pretty crazy for this sort of country.

The wreath Leschenaultia, what I consider to be the most over-hyped flower in the state. Everywhere that you travel within areas they grow people tend to seek them out, shires and councils promote them, tourist bureau’s have printed mud maps on where to find them, fellow travelers have stories of “did you see the wreath flowers, you must see the wreath flower. Yeah, I saw the wreath flower, I did the 70km round trip out of Coorow first time around to see the wreath flower in an old gravel pit.

And the flower never seems to be close to a town or easy to find, “drive 20km out of town, turn at the old graveyard, follow that track for 5km, then at the old water tank, walk 500m into the bush and they are in behind the hill with the thorny bushes.”  But then every now and then you tend to spot them by chance especially once you know what you are looking for.

Yep, this is them growing along the side of the main road out of Perenjori on the way to the rabbit proof fence. They were everywhere, and the woman at the information centre agreed that they were a little over rated and probably only popular because they can be hard to find and they are a bit different to most flowers.

This was an unusual little bulbous flower, shiny scales on the outside of it’s bulbous body then curly little yellow petals.

I really need to spend a little more time trying to identify all of these unknown plants, ahh so much to do. Here’s another one.

This flower is absolutely tiny, each little flower set is perhaps only 3-5mm across. I saw a slight touch of yellow on the ground and wanted to get a photo to try and see what it was, the individual little flowers actually look quite cute.

This trigger plant is very interesting when you look closely, trigger plants in general are amazing, when an insect lands on it to feed then this “triggers” the floral column at the back to snap forward covering the insect in pollen, they are also carnivorous with their small stocky hairs on the back of the flower.