Winter (2019) in Kings Park

Every Spring, southwest WA offers “the greatest wildflower show on Earth”.

One choice venue is just a short walk – or a free bus – from Perth’s CBD.

Spring, however, is not the only “good” time; every bushy WA place offers particular, different delights at any time of any year…

If you only experience Spring’s floral “explosion” you will entirely miss the great many wildflowers which bloom only at various other times.

 

 

 

Now is the time to enjoy Greenhoods.  These, I think, are Banded Greenhoods, Pterostylis vittata. 

See more of this species here, and for more on Greenhoods in general, click this.

 

 

 

 

The first five months of 2019 in Perth were freakishly dry. June 2019 is already the wettest June in fourteen years.

Perth’s monthly total will likely reach something like 225mm, or “nine inches”.

As I type, it is raining, and more is expected, but June 2005 will probably remain this so-far-drying young millennium’s wettest: 251 mm fell in June ‘05.

Those with short memories – or young lives – consider Junes ‘05 and ‘19 “incredibly wet”.

However, pre-1990, both Junes were well within longterm statistics’ “normal” range…and far short of Perth’s wettest June.

In June 1945, the Bureau’s “old” office recorded 476.1mm!

One of the more unforgivable examples of “lying with statistics” is the Bureau of Meteorology’s current (mis) representation of Perth’s statistical averages, and “maximum” and “minimum” figures.

The figures now offered by BOM are ludicrous; they reach back only to 1993, when BOM in Perth relocated to a “new” office.

BOM – and most online weather sites – now omit or hide the more meaningful longer-term figures.(it took a hell of of a lot of persistence for me to uncover the truth that June 2005 was not in fact remotely near to its BOM-preferred but fictitious status as “Perth’s wettest June”)

So, in 2019 Perth has experienced a wetter-than-average June, but not a “record” June, nor one remotely close to “freakishly” wet.

So dry – actually-freakishly so – were the immediately-preceding several months that Perth has not suffered flooding of the kind that would almost certainly have occurred if June 2019’s rains had followed a “normal” first five months of the year.

This sequence of events probably explains why so “surprisingly” few toadstools, mushrooms and other fungal fruiting bodies were yet evident when I took all of this post’s photos on June 25.

 

The tiny toadstool above is one of just a few we saw that morning.

Look carefully at the gumnut above, and at the one nestling in the Grevillea…you can see that – like countless others –  they were  severed by a cockatoo’s beak.

Flowers are by no means the only lovely things in Kings Park.

 

 

…and not every colourful thing is actually a living thing!