Orchids & other flora: Kings Park, now

All photos taken Friday 8 September, 2017, in the bushland of Kings Park…an easy walk (or free bus into the manicured part of Kings Park, then a short walk into its bushland) from Perth’s CBD.

The Kings Park Festival runs throughout September, with many special events, talks, activities and attractions.

The annual number of individual visits to Kings Park is around 6 million.

The figure for New York’s Central Park is around 42 million.

Around 60 million tourists visited NYC last year.

The New York metro area’s resident population is a little over 20 million.

Perth’s metro area is home to a little over 2 million,

I cannot find any very meaningful figure on tourist visitors to Perth.(the ones I can find are hopelessly-conflated, but would appear to show that the annual combined total of interstate and international visitors to Perth is somewhat “south” of 2.5 million)

So, relatively speaking, Perth’s Kings Park is a much more popular destination for its own city’s residents and for visitors than is NYC’s much more famous, slightly smaller inner urban park!

In Kings Park many thousands of cowslip orchids are now blooming.

Almost all of their flowers are predominantly yellow, and they look something like this:

 

 

If you look at the orchids atop this post, you will notice that their colouration is very different, but their “physique” is similar.

The “pink cowslips” were the only such pair we saw on September 8.

I am not a botanist.

Perhaps the “pink cowslips” are something else altogether – not cowslips at all.

Maybe – as some other bloggers’ posts would suggest – they are a hybrid of cowslip orchid and pink fairy orchid.

They quite probably are the natural hybrid Caladenia X spectabilis, which is a hybrid between Caladenia flava (the common Cowslip Orchid) and Caladenia latifolia (Pink Fairy Orchid).

Many pink fairies are now blooming.

 

 

The most inescapably-evident orchids are donkey orchids – you don’t need “orchid eyes” to spot them.

 

 

However, as we witnessed multiple times on September 8, many people walk straight past spider orchids, without noticing their presence.

 

 

 

Even if you don’t have “orchid eyes”, the general Spring splendour is hard to miss.

 

 

The pink-flowering bush in the foreground of the picture above is a Swan River myrtle, Hypocalymma robustum.

As always, a closer view will prove rewarding.

 

Many of the grass trees currently have young, green spikes; they are “meant” to be vertical, but not a few are deformed…nicely.

 

I suggest that you zoom in on/enlarge the above.

For the next little while my beloved and I will be in wilder parts of southwestern WA – places where wildflowers are more easily found than is internet connectivity.

So, the next post may or may not happen before September’s final week.