Story Title: Wild Flowers
Episode 1: WA's Great Gardens
Date: 3 October 2010
Presenter: Neville Passmore

Spring is the best time for wild flower hunting in the hills and the best thing is, you don't have to go too far or hunt to hard in the Perth hills region.

Neville's Tips and Facts

• One of the outstanding features of Western Australian wildflowers is the shear diversity and this is a product of adversity and long time lines. Western Australia is one of the most geographically stable locations on earth so the plants have had plenty of time to adapt to both the harsh, dry climate and nutrient poor soils.
• Granite outcrop heats up in summer to 60 degrees plus, yet varieties such as the Borya can survive. It does so by drying up in the heat and it looks dead. When the rains come in autumn they will turn green and bounce back to life in a day or two, quickly flowering and setting seed for the next generation.
• Deceptive donkey orchids shaped like pea flower deceive bees into coming in for pea nectar of which there is none and in doing so, pollinate the orchid.
• In fact WA's orchids have evolved into insect mimics so accurate that wasps will come to mate with a flower in the mistaken belief that it is a female wasp, so its own coupling achieves nothing for the insect but everything for the plant.
• Pincushion member of protea family has intricate flower clusters with every filament a flower. The colour is bright, as the plant has to tell the world its ready for pollination in great competition with hundreds of other plants.
• Feather flowers verticordia have the most delicate of flowers but that softness belies the stone heart toughness required of the plant to live on these rocky exposed slopes.
• Weeds watsonia and freesias from South Africa are an invasive species. What we can do is join friends groups to help these precious pieces of suburban wilderness to survive and maintain the biodiversity, which marks this part of Australia as a hotspot on a world stage.