The photos in #2 through #4 in this series were all taken in Spring 2020 – in a section of Waychinicup that had been burnt some time in the preceding several months, probably, via a Summer lightning strike.
Today’s Hakea was blooming on the very windy afternoon of 07 February 2022, in a different part of Waychinicup.
This section had also been burnt, but several years earlier, via lightning strike.
Fire is integral to the local ecology.
That does not mean that all fires are “not a problem”.
If they occur too often, and burn too hot, fires could prove catastrophic, even to the fire-adapted plants that are a feature of southwest WA.
Too-frequent, too-hot fires rob even fire-adapted species of the time needed for them to set their seeds, and for new generations to survive long enough to develop that capability.
Southwest WA is a global hotspot for flora diversity and for endemicism; in other words, it has a prodigious number of flowering plant species, and a great many of them do not naturally occur anywhere else.