The Basin Track

Lambertia formosa


Acacia suaveolens


Female casuarina against the sky


Scribbly gum, E. haemastoma


An unidentified flower


An unidentified flower

Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, the colours seemed very true for these flowers. The mountain devils were a rare and striking red amidst their soft grey foliage. Coming up the path, the first flower I noticed was a Banksia spinulosa with its lovely black stigmas edging the bright orange of the flower and then the somewhat bedraggled Acacia suaveolens with the rhythm of its phyllodes against the soft white flower heads. Photographing it, you notice that the smooth edges of the phyllodes are translucent.

The red and grey spider flowers (Grevilleas) were flowering and the grey spider flower was striking with its flowers atop its stalks, and there was a hakea, common as dirt, no doubt, but flowering too with tiny flowers all along its stems and huge woody knobbly seed heads.

I put in the photo of the scribbly gum because of the beautiful red of its stalks. It too, was flowering. In the rain, its flowers always remind me of Little Ragged Blossom.

Not surprisingly, I saw two flowers I had never seen before. Never seen before, since in both cases the flower was little more than a simple continuation of the foliage, itself largely unremarkable. And I am assuming I had never seen the reddish one before, since I have probably walked on by thinking that the plant was entirely dead or burnt since the entire plant was orange. So easy to pass by and assume familiarity. And equally easy, in my ignorance, to assume that I have never seen it before as I did with a Boronia which had turned to seed.