The Western Australian wildflower season, month by month

Western Australia has more than twelve thousand wildflower species, and roughly sixty per cent of them grow nowhere else on earth. It is the largest wildflower display anywhere, and the most common mistake made about it (by visitors and by people who have lived here for decades) is to treat it as an event with a date.

It is not an event. It is a front, and it moves. The bloom begins in the far north in about June and finishes in the far south around November, travelling roughly a thousand kilometres over six months as temperature and daylength shift. Arriving in the wrong place in the right month gets you nothing. The season is not a week you might miss; it is a wave you can meet anywhere along its length if you know where it has got to.

Why the southwest does this

The scale of it comes down to bad soil and long isolation.

The southwest of Western Australia has not been glaciated, flooded by sea, or thrown up into new mountains in an extraordinarily long time. Its soils are among the oldest and most deeply weathered on the planet, and after that much time in the rain they have been leached of nearly everything a plant wants: phosphorus in particular is present in quantities that would kill an ordinary garden.

Plants have had tens of millions of undisturbed years to solve that problem, and they solved it in an enormous number of separate ways. The Proteaceae (banksias, hakeas, grevilleas, dryandras) grow dense mats of cluster roots, short-lived brushes of fine rootlets that chemically mine phosphorus out of sand that appears to hold none. Others went carnivorous. Others formed fungal partnerships. Isolation kept each solution local, so the region fractured into thousands of narrowly distributed species, many confined to a single range or a few sandplain paddocks.

Fire did the rest. Most of the flowering here is fire-adapted, and much of it is fire-triggered: seed held in woody cones for years, released only by heat. The result is kwongan, the sandplain heath that covers much of the region: low, scrubby, unremarkable for most of the year, and then briefly one of the most botanically diverse plant communities in existence. The southwest is the only part of Australia recognised as a global biodiversity hotspot, and this is why.

June to July: the north

The season opens in the Pilbara and along the Coral Coast, where flowering follows the northern wet rather than the southern winter.

Look for mulla mulla (Ptilotus), the soft pink-purple foxtails that come up in drifts across the spinifex country, and for Sturt’s desert pea (Swainsona formosa) on disturbed ground and roadside gravel, a sprawling grey-leaved thing with blood-red keeled flowers, each with a black boss at the centre. Country around Carnarvon and Exmouth carries the earliest colour.

This is the least visited leg of the season and often the most striking, because the flowers sit against red rock and spinifex rather than green scrub.

July to August: the Midwest

The front reaches the Midwest and the country inland of Geraldton. This is where the season starts to become the thing people picture.

Everlastings begin: Rhodanthe, Xerochrysum and their relatives, papery-petalled daisies in white, yellow and a startling pink, which hold their form and colour even when dried. In a good year they carpet whole paddocks and road verges.

Kalbarri is the anchor. The river gorges and coastal cliffs there hold an unusually high concentration of species in a small area, and it is one of the few places where you can see the season without a long drive between stops.

The wreath flower (Lechenaultia macrantha) appears around Mullewa and Pindar in this window, and is worth planning around. It grows in a near-perfect ring, a flat circle of red-and-cream flowers around a bare centre, almost always on disturbed gravel at the edge of a road. It looks so much like something a person arranged that most photographs of it are met with suspicion.

August to September: the Wheatbelt

The everlastings peak and move inland, and the Wheatbelt has its short annual reversal of character: months of stubble and bare paddock, and then the verges go pink.

The granite outcrops matter here. Each one sheds water into the sand at its base and supports a small distinct community of plants that will not grow twenty metres away: orchids, trigger plants, feather flowers. The outcrops function as islands, and they are worth stopping at.

This is also the peak window for the sundews (Drosera), which are far more common in WA than most people notice, small, red, glandular, and carnivorous, catching insects on stalked mucilage in nutrient-poor sand.

September to October: Perth and the Darling Scarp

The front arrives in the southwest corner.

Kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos manglesii) is the signature: the state floral emblem, red-stemmed with a green flower, the whole thing covered in dense fur. It grows on sandy country around Perth and is one of the very few wildflowers most Western Australians can name on sight. Its relatives extend the range: yellows, oranges, and the black kangaroo paw (Macropidia fuliginosa), which is genuinely black-and-green and looks like nothing else.

Kings Park runs its wildflower festival through September, which is the least effortful way to see several hundred species without leaving the city. The bushland at Bold Park and along the Darling Scarp is doing the same thing without the labels.

Orchids are at their best in this window: spider orchids, donkey orchids, the various hammer orchids that reproduce by convincing a male wasp it has found a female.

October to November: the Great Southern

The season finishes in the south, and finishes strongest.

The Stirling Range holds over fifteen hundred species in a range about sixty kilometres long, including the mountain bells (Darwinia), several of which grow on one peak and nowhere else on earth. Fitzgerald River National Park, on the coast east of Albany, is comparably rich, and carries the royal hakea (Hakea victoria), a plant whose leaves are large, rigid, cupped and marbled in cream, yellow and red, and which look far more like flowers than its actual flowers do.

By November the front has run out of continent, and it is done.

Reading a season before you drive

None of the above is a guarantee, because all of it depends on rain. The everlasting displays in particular are an annual event only in the sense that they are possible annually: the difference between a good year and a poor one is enormous, and it is set by autumn and early winter rainfall months before anything flowers.

Two rules cover most of it. Follow the front south rather than picking a destination and hoping. And look at the verges: roadsides are disturbed, ungrazed, and get extra run-off from the bitumen, so the flowering there is reliably ahead of the paddock behind it.

The plates in Wildflowers Folio Volume I are drawn from this season (kangaroo paws, native peas, everlastings and orchids) with each plate’s footer naming the species in both common and botanical form.