Slightly Off Center

Posted by Sylvia Kelso

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Preamble

I once heard a local on a Spanish bus proclaim, as we topped a hill, and Barcelona in all its then hundred square miles and three-and-a-half million inhabitants spread out before us: “Es mi pueblo!” My local town is no competition, but it is my “village,” my pueblo, even if tone-deaf founders endowed it with the clanking name of “Townsville,” which I more often shorten to The Ville. This is a series of (brief) blogs about some flora you may chance upon in the The Ville during a calendar year

In my spacious state, “The Ville” lies far north of the state capital, Brisbane, and still well north of Capricorn, the official tropical zone marker, but though it’s now abundantly endowed with palms, The Ville sports no tropical rainforests or overflowing waterfalls. In fact, The Ville belongs in the category of Dry Tropics – that is, its rainfall is a long way from the heavy average needed to naturally support such delights.

Nevertheless, The Ville does sport an abundance of flora, native or imported, and most months show some off to advantage. (For The Ville, the traditional four-season year cycle is not only inverted, at least if you live in the northern hemisphere, but also sways in and out of sync with the native seasonal cycle. And that has only two parts, the Dry, and the Wet. The Wet runs optionally from November to February, the Dry has the rest.)

In the Wet – January

For this year, January kicked off the end of a long dry spell with an emphatic Wet: no “real” floods as yet, but lots of deluge rainfalls both along the coast and inland, and for most people, a welcome lessening of the usual January heat. And some usual suspects are coming into flower after the rain.

First up is the Spider Lily, or more accurately, the Beach Spider Lily, an import originating in the central Americas. There is an Australian species I’ve seen in flower in the bush. Here in town, the Beach Spider is commonplace, often used as a civic planting, because they are both resilient and tough. They do spread, in what they find suitable ground – in my case, one has occupied the wrong side of the drive-edge bed for some three years. My main plant, however, has, just last week – after the first real rain –  come into flower.

Also currently flowering in my yard is another imported, now thoroughly naturalised pretty. The (actually Golden) Allamanda is from South America. Here it’s often pruned into shrubs, potted or left in the ground. Mine was intended as a lowest level shrub in a garden bed, but never really flourished, until a pruning of the neighbour hibiscus let it assumed its natural habit, which is a vine. It’s now crawling all over the hibiscus, while appearing as a shrub in pots just down the road. (See red hibiscus flower  at centre of the pic.)

Final for this month, a native at last, less common than the first two, but much prized in The Ville when it grows properly. The Swamp Bloodwood’s homeland is the Top End, from Western Australia into the Northern Territory, but mine is now a big tree so enthusiastic it takes regular pruning to keep it safe. This year it has a bumper crop of “gumnuts,” buds for the magnificent flowers, some low enough to get pix of the flowering sequence. First come the nuts:

Then the flower grows under the “cap”, which opens like a lid – look right:

And finally,  the flowers.

Yesterday I was writing that it hadn’t happened  this year. Today I went out for something else and found these shots, as the whole tree bursts into bloom. But just for contrast, a shot from one year of a rainbow lorikeet, the local species with whom the Swampy is also a favourite, getting among the growing nuts  in the Wet season rain.

https://bookviewcafe.com/flora-of-the-north-queensland-ville-ii/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=21311