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A forest floor’s “natural abstracts” often delight me rather more than do some allegedly “iconic” abstract artworks on “important” galleries’ walls.
As is true of all photos in the current series’ “Porongurup” sequence, the photo is ©️ Doug Spencer, & was taken in mid-afternoon of 12 February 2025, on the northern side of Porongurup National Park.
Leave a CommentAny forest’s floor will repay your close attention, at any time.
This is true even when an unusually-prolonged dry spell has ensured that on this day the relevant forest will fail to deliver its usual visual treat in the “fungi department”.
However, in the “Karri trees’ annual exfoliation department” all was as it should be on 12 February 2025 in Porongurup National Park.
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You are looking at the “skin” on a venerable Karri’s trunk, as it was on the afternoon of 12 February 2025.
Six months earlier – or six months later – it would have looked remarkably different, in both colour and texture.
Karri shed and renew their bark in an annual cycle.
“Karri loam” – the particular soil type in which Karri trees grow – is primarily composed of decomposed Karri bark!
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This series has more birds, but not just yet; the next several episodes look at details of a forest.
These chapters are the fruit of a short walk on a wintry summer’s day.
50 kilometres northeast of Albany, the Porongurups are a “modest” mountain range – only about 15 kilometres long.
They rise no higher than 670 metres ASL, but have enough altitude – and are close enough to the Southern Ocean – to create their own microclimate.
The Porongurups are much cooler and also very much more moist than is everywhere else within sight of them.
They are remnants of what, more than one billion years ago, were much mightier mountains.
Leave a CommentHarewood Forest is definitely not “virgin”.
Until well into the 19th century it was a pristine, very tall, Karri-dominant forest
By circa 1900 no grand trees remained; all millable timber had been “mined”.
Happily, however, the forest has regrown well.
Magnificent as are southwest WA’s tall trees – all, WA-endemic – they are far from their forests’ only “WA-only”, wonderful/wondrous-strange plants.
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20 kilometres southwest of Pemberton, in southwestern WA’s “Karri country”, the Yeagarup Dunes cover circa 30 square kilometres.
They are the Southern Hemisphere’s largest mobile, land-locked dune system.
The Yeagarup Dunes are currently advancing inland at circa 4 metres per year.
This post’s photos were taken from the top of their “hungry” edge, on 27 October 2016.
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Southwestern Western Australia is rightly renowned for the extraordinary diversity of its flowering plants.
Its fungi are even more diverse.
Fungi species comprehensively outnumber the combined total of plant and animal species.
Macrofungi are the ones with fruiting bodies big enough to be visible to an observant, naked human eye, in the wild.
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This post’s featured colour photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken just four minutes before – and from almost the same vantage point – as the immediately preceding post’s monochrome image.
I have been lucky enough to walk in many different kinds of forest, on six continents and various islands.
All are beautiful, in many different ways, but if I had to choose a favourite, it would be so-called “virgin Karri forest”.
Comments closedBoth are integral to this forest type; the “how” and the “how often” of the former are endlessly debated/contested.
All photos taken on the notional “last day of winter”, August 31 2018; most of them in the so-called “100 Year Forest” near Pemberton.
One CommentSometimes billed as the world’s oldest mountain range and once soaring higher than Everest now does, Porongurup has eroded to very modest heights. The above image…
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