The Unique Australian Native Flora That Live With Me

by Shelley Barton May 31, 2019

Over the past few years I have been growing a fascination for our native Australian wild flowers, in particular, our beautiful and unique orchids.

I live on a 1 acre property in the South West of Western Australia and when we built our home three years ago, I avoided clearing as much as possible which left us with a lot of natural, shrubby bush land. I knew that it was likely we had some native orchid flowers on our block and sure enough, we did. The first one I noticed was a white Sandplain Spider Orchid. It grew right next to my driveway so I'd always see it's lovely face when I drove past.

Photo by Robin Parsons

Over time I discovered I also had the more common orchids such as the Donkey Orchid and the Cowslip Orchids.

In 2018 roughly a month after orchids begin to flower, I decided to take the time and go for a really thorough look around to see if I might be lucky enough to find some more orchids that were perhaps hiding, seriously, if you don't know what you are looking for or your don't take the time to slow down and have a REALLY good look, you miss them!

Sure enough I found about six different species that I had never seen before. I contacted my friend who are avid orchid hunters/photographers and they came to check them out. We believe I may have the following spider orchids -

Sand Plain Spider X Carosel Spider Caladenia
Speciosa X Caladenia Arenicola
Sand Plain Spider Caladenia Speciosa
Carousel Spider Caladenia Arenicola
Whispy Spider orchid CALADENIA FILAMENTOSA
Pink Fairy Orchid Caladenia latifolia

I was absolutely blown away and felt so privelaged to have such an amazing variety of native Western Australian orchids on my land! These would provide the perfect subjects and reference photos for my art work.

I'm interested to see this year what comes up, I have tried my best to keep the ground area where they were all found free of disturbance but we put a shed in recently and there was a bit of work done around one particular area so I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's all ok.

Below are some photos taken by my friend Robin Parsons