Tom M. Wilson

Every spring Western Australia gets one of the largest floral displays on planet earth, up there with the profuse flowerings of California. In fact, because this part of Australia has been a stable bit of land, with not much going on in the way of mountain building and the like, for the past 250 million years, and because the soils are leached of nutrients so that not too many big trees shade out the little heath plants, species of flowering plant have just kept joining the party, century after century. We’ve got to the point where the southwestern corner of WA has more species of flowering plants than almost anywhere else in the world. The Everlastings above were found in King’s Park.

This flash fire of yellow I saw on the north shore of the Swan River in one of Fremantle’s only remaining pockets of uncleared nature.