Wyalkatchem to Kondinin

Pea flowers are found through out Western Australia and in a vast array of sizes and colours with some of the more common colours being red, yellow and orange and mixes of these. I’ve neglected them a little with my photographs, well there are two things I’ve neglected, pea flowers and acacias or wattles. I’ve probably neglected pea flowers because I spent so much time in Denmark trying to photograph the purple/blue Hardenbergia flower, I literally spent many days photographing this plant trying to just get one really good picture. There seemed to be a two fold reason, blues in flowers can be difficult to capture well or perhaps it’s just my eyes, and also it seemed that every time you’d get close to a good picture, there would be a deformity in the flower. Same as the picture above, you can see on the right hand side that there are some flowers failing. And acacias I tend to find a little boring, they are just yellow balls usually, not much in the way of character to them and early pictures I took weren’t very exciting, I’ll have to try again in the coming weeks to get some nice acacias.

This little orange ground cover was prolific in one section by the side of the road just out of Kondinin, the flowers look like little pomegranate flowers, but once again my books didn’t have them identified. For this section of my trip I’m really moving fairly fast for the deep south of the state, much of the countryside seems to be fairly similar and I wanted to hit the rich diversity within some of the southern hot spots.

I’m thinking that this little succulent is probably the forming fruit rather than a flower as such, you can see the remains of the flower parts in the centre and the globules on the outside were weren’t water but rather a sticky, waxy type substance.

This Eremophila was by the side of the road in a very dry and uninteresting area. Very sparse vegetation and harsh conditions yet once again, when you look closely you can always find things of interest. In fact just beside the Eremophila bush behind a tree only a couple of metres from the road in the middle of no where with the closest town perhaps 30km away I found this.

A carton of cascade beer, completely intact yet disintegrating in the weather. I wonder what the story is behind this. Someone at some time has put this behind a tree, perhaps expecting to come back for it, perhaps for someone else to pick up, definitely not something you expect to find way out here.

This is the countryside out this way, not really much to look at is is?  But at this stop I found the succulent in the picture above, the eremophila, a carton of beer, and all of the following plants.

These are extremely tiny growing on the ground.

Another tiny plant but what a magnificent flower. Yet another one of those plants like the previous one, you see something on the ground but it’s so small you really have no idea what it might be until you look at the pictures later.

Yes this is what’s known as the swirly, spiral, fluffy plant. I don’t think I need to add any more to that. (edit – actually found the plant later, cottony bluebush)

A very small everlasting type flower, at least that’s what I’m calling it, it has the papery shiny type leaf of the flowers often grouped as “everlastings”.

I believe this is a variety of bluebush, it’s not the flower as such as they are insignificant but this is the seedcase, the colour is magnificent.

I believe these are a seedcase rather than a flower and I’ve found them all the way from Kalbarri down, very soft like a spongy cushion and small, this is perhaps 3cm across, a small annual plant of some type.

All of these photos on the post except for the first two that I found further down the road closer to Kondinin were plants I found in the arid bush land I showed you earlier. Without walking too far from the car either as the flies were pretty bad. I also ate some small yellow berries, I’d eaten some of the same ones up in Kalbarri and they are very sweet, I must go and look them up in my “Wild food plants” book.