A suitable title for this post’s hero:
The Lonely Spider
In the “spring wildflower season” department in Western Australia’s southwest, 2023 was generally “very early, very short”.
By virtue of being in Europe for six weeks, we had well and truly missed its peak.
As this series has already shown, this did not mean that by 30 October we were too late to see a great many beautiful wildflowers.
However, five and a half hours into the day’s strolling through wandoo woodland and mixed, eucalypt-dominated, so-called “northern jarrah forest”, it seemed that all of this year’s spider orchids had been and gone.
Then, at 1.43 pm – a little to the west of Albany Highway, circa 65 kilometres southeast of Perth’s CBD – we saw “our” day’s one resplendent spider orchid.
(on the forest floor behind, in soft focus, are a few of “our” day’s thousands of trigger plants. In the foreground is one of the day’s thousands of carnivorous plants)
As you will see in this series’ next chapter, a few hours earlier we had encountered some splendid examples of quite another kind of orchid.