About the Western Australia 2003 Photos

This page last modified on 15 December, 2003

Lou and I went to Western Australia for a second trip during the peak blooming season of the wildflowers there.  According to one guidebook (Simon Nevill, "Guide to the Wildflowers of South Western Australia", Fremantle, WA 1998):

"The south west region of Western Australia has one of the richest floras on Earth, a very ancient landscape supporting around 9000 plant taxa."

We started at the north west port city of Karratha on 12 September, drove thru rural areas to the south coast cities of Albany, Bremer Bay and Walpole, then departed via Perth on 15 October.  I came home with nearly 8000 well-exposed digital photos, of which roughly 7000 were of wildflowers. The rest were scenes to remind us of the places we visited, plus a few showing the unique birds of that region. (Lou added 15 species to her life list, but I failed to get photos of most of those.)

A majority of the wildflowers of that region look strange and unusual in the eyes of a North American.  I was especially fascinated by the terrestrial Orchids that are native to the region bounded to the west of a line running roughly from Kalbarri to Esperance. There are over 500 recognized species of these orchids, roughly one-third of them in the group known as "Spider Orchids".  I succeeded in getting photos of about 55 orchid species, and of those more than half were spider orchids. Most of the flowers are small, being roughly the diameter of a U.S. penny coin.  But when viewed close-up, they are intricate, beautiful, and amazingly varied in subtle ways.  My main source for identifying the orchids is the excellent book (Noel Hoffman & Andrew Brown, "Orchids of South-West Australia", Univ. Western Australia Press, 1998).  They make it clear that the naming, and genetic differentiation, of many of the orchid species is still a work in progress.  Undoubtedly I've gotten a few of the species identities wrong.

In this initial posting, I've filled up one 10Mbyte volume with reduced resolution samples of just the orchids photographed on this trip. I'll be adding samples of other wildflowers as time permits. Notes on some of the samples will follow after I get a chance to complete a much larger collection of full-screen images for display from CD-Rom.

Ken Bowles