In Flower This Week

12 September 2003

A Wonderful Walk Wherever you Wander!

You will see, smell and hear these Gardens a-buzz with busyness and the effort of   Spring anywhere you turn this week, even the smaller plants with their tiny leaves and minute flowers in the Tasmanian Flora Section [Sections 142, 230-237] below the car park are ready for inspection. A magnifying glass would be of great help – be guided by the bees.

Bauera rubioides - click for larger image

At the far edge which runs parallel to the road, Bauera rubioides [Section 230] with its long sprays of pink, shelters Lasiopetalum micranthum [Section 230] and its very tiny brown flowers. Philotheca verrucosa [Section 230] has very prolific pink buds and white starry flowers. Spyridium obovatum var. obovatum [Section 230] has small squirts of yellow among its striking rounded leaves. A scruffy Melaleuca squamea [Section 236] flutters heavy lilac lashes at Ozothamnus costatifructus [Section237] on the other side of the path, a smoky green bush with grey little flowers. Hibbertia riparia [Section 236] looking just right and bright, as hibbertias always do, and Allocasuarina zephyrea [Section 237] stealing the limelight as the sunlight filters through the very dark furry flowers along new blue-green growth of needles, to give it flashes of glowing red. On the opposite side, new fern fronds are unfurling out of the earth [Section 236].

Duck into the Tasmanian Rainforest from the car park and at the big green and mossy tree stump just before the bridge is Anopterus glandulosus [Section 66], little white bells at its tips showing off its glossy, toothed leaves, while Dicksonia Antarctica[Section 66], behind it, proudly presents several new fronds. Stop just before the steps on the right and look very closely at Atherosperma moschatum [Section 67], the southern sassafrass, on your left and above you. See the many snowdrop-like flowers under the leaves at the branch tips? Look hard. There is another tree fern just before you exit at the café, with many fronds at different stages of unfurling [Section 67].

It is hard to decide which way to turn now, but a walk along the main path leads to great grevilleas galore groovin’ into gear in their taxonomic plantings at Sections 22-28. What they won’t do to attract a honey-eater! Go, grevilleas!

Wander back along the path past Sections 18, 3, perhaps into Sections 1 and 2, to soak in the wattles, and another grevillea planting [Section 36]. Then along the Rainforest Gully, looking up to see the small white flowers of Myoporum acuminatum [Section 104] and Acronychia imperforata and A. littoralis [Section 114] with their small yellow flowers. Are the gang-gang cockatoos still willy nilly pruning high-up, just because they can? Tasmannia insipida [Section 125], the peppertree, is also flowering.

Wherever you chose to walk this week would be wonderfully rewarding, yet you’ll have missed an awful lot at the places you didn’t get to go! You’ll just have to come back, again and again, as I do.

Sally