Their scent should stimulate our olfactory senses to bring us in touch with the earth. The colours of native flowers for landscaping should make us more aware of how our emotional senses operate. Shapes that reflect a precise geometry are lessons in order. Underlying all of that, our total experience of a flower should be the essence of how we recognize beauty.
Blooming…
Must be a remarkable process. Imagine doing it—feeling individual parts of yourself becoming what they were meant to be from the time they were contained in a seed. Wow. Well, let’s get on to the finished product and visit our cities one last time.
Perth
A beauty in a ball. This is the Blue Lace Flower, or Trachymene coerulea. It loves the sandy soil of Perth and is one of the stars in Kings Park. Letting them go to seed and keeping them in a paper sack provides gardeners with next year’s crop. This beauty is a great addition to our collection of native flowers for landscaping.
The Pink Everlasting is not seen in the wild, so perhaps a garden club will take up the project— this native flower is too stylish to restrict to formal garden settings. In both cases, the geometry is appealing and the colour luminous to more than satisfy our appetite for garden excitement.
And lastly is this unique creature called the Bracted Grevillea. The flowers, which are borne on the ends of stems, are shielded by bracts (leaf-like structures) until they open. Another project for our re-vegetation friends is well worth the effort to see a massing of these native flowers for landscaping. Just a nice free-form in contrast to all that geometrical order.
Alice Springs
Sturt’s Desert Pea among the yellow field daisies at the Alice Springs Desert Park in Alice Springs give us two natives to re-vegetate and aren’t they gloriously sited. Both thrive in the central desert—the daisies in drifts that look like clouds against the landscape, With the Stut’s Pea peeking through every once in a while.
A native bush tomato or Solanum plant in full flower along Larapinta Drive in Central Australia gives the area a lush effect when they’re grown en masse. The colour is the same fuchsia of the African Violet whose geometry they imitate.
Darwin
The ‘Trigger plant’ (Stylidium sp.), has a device which transfers pollen to insects that lands on the flower. One of our native plant society friends tells us that, “The floodplains are mostly of recent origin (less than 10,000 years old) and are unusually fertile, compared with most other environments in northern Australia.” Which means we should be seeing more native growth, so now we have a mystery. I would have expected a lush growth in this tropical area.
A feature of these open forests is the occasional mass flowering of several species, most notably the Darwin Woollybutt, (Eucalyptus miniata), blooming in this gorgeous orange to scarlet flowers during the mid-dry season.
And now that we have our collection completed, we’re ready for a little design fun … stay tuned!
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