The Wollemi Pine was quite recently discovered and is very rare. It belongs to its own genus and is, so far, the only known species of that genus. In the wild it occurs in remote areas of the Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney, but the location is kept secret from the public. Otherwise you can only see it in botanical gardens where none of the specimens are very old. This one is well under 2 metres tall.
New growth at the top:
A Telopea (one of the Telopeas is the Waratah, but I'm not sure if this is the one - they all look similar!).
Several of these flowers appeared to be growing directly out of the ground, though I suppose they weren't.
Don't think I've ever seen a tree fern put out so many new fronds at once!
New growth at the top:
A Telopea (one of the Telopeas is the Waratah, but I'm not sure if this is the one - they all look similar!).
Several of these flowers appeared to be growing directly out of the ground, though I suppose they weren't.
Don't think I've ever seen a tree fern put out so many new fronds at once!
I was at a meeting on Friday. I went and bought a new camera on Saturday morning and then, having seen an item about it in the local newspaper, made an unplanned visit to the Botanic Garden. Spent a couple of hours wandering around there - mid-October is apparently the peak period for wildflowers - and then went to meet ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
n2kaja for coffee at the National Museum. We had a coffee and ended up talking all afternoon, so I still haven't seen any of the museum's exhibits! Then I drove back to Sydney.
A great highlight of the Botanic Garden visit were the Sturt's Desert Peas (not in fact peas at all, but then the Aboriginal name is 'eye of the kangaroo' which is also wrong). They are very, very difficult to cultivate and fairly sparse in the wild anyway. So the people at the Canberra garden are justifiably proud of their achievement and there are several tubs of them dotted around.
Pretty much as they would look in the desert.
n2kaja for coffee at the National Museum. We had a coffee and ended up talking all afternoon, so I still haven't seen any of the museum's exhibits! Then I drove back to Sydney. A great highlight of the Botanic Garden visit were the Sturt's Desert Peas (not in fact peas at all, but then the Aboriginal name is 'eye of the kangaroo' which is also wrong). They are very, very difficult to cultivate and fairly sparse in the wild anyway. So the people at the Canberra garden are justifiably proud of their achievement and there are several tubs of them dotted around.
Pretty much as they would look in the desert.
I left Sydney at around 4.45 after a meeting and got here around 3 hours later. Basically there is a freeway from my campus to the edge of Canberra! I could not find my camera anywhere! Anyway I have another meeting all day tomorrow (met the NZ contingent at dinner) and plan to spend Saturday being a tourist. I might buy a new camera since the old one was getting black spots on the display screen.
The landscape around here always tugs at the heart strings - it is so dry compared to Sydney and around sunset quite beautiful. It didn't really get dark until the very end of the trip. Lake George still has no water and I was thinking that the most remarkable thing about that is that it hasn't turned into a salt pan. In fact there were cows grazing where the water used to be. It struck me that this is why Lake George is so reputedly mysterious. Other lakes evaporate in a drought and become salt pans. Lake George just becomes pasture. My guess is that this means the lake is not rain-fed, but spring-fed. But I don't know.
The landscape around here always tugs at the heart strings - it is so dry compared to Sydney and around sunset quite beautiful. It didn't really get dark until the very end of the trip. Lake George still has no water and I was thinking that the most remarkable thing about that is that it hasn't turned into a salt pan. In fact there were cows grazing where the water used to be. It struck me that this is why Lake George is so reputedly mysterious. Other lakes evaporate in a drought and become salt pans. Lake George just becomes pasture. My guess is that this means the lake is not rain-fed, but spring-fed. But I don't know.
