A long way from MtLawleyShire #3: Trees

Trees.  Yes I love trees, and this post is full of them, but they are different trees – all West Australian natives, but I can’t name them all.

These first shorts were taken at the Edith Cowan University campus at Joondalup.  It had rained in the morning, and reasonably heavy showers.  The drops were still clinging to some of the needles of the sheoaks growing outside the library (& otherwise, the trees were very difficult to photograph):

 

This is one large tree growing by the access road – there aren’t many large trees on this part of the campus – it was only built a few years ago and I think many of the trees would’ve been cleared.

These trees were in the park area by the lake where we had out picnic.  We sat on rocks, or walked around actually, and most of the trees were paperbarks, but there were a few others: a young peppermint tree and a pale gum:

 

larger and older:

 

One had a family of skinks – there were more than these 2 but the others were camera-shy 🙂

 

Just the beauty and grace of this – against a sky turning blue as the clouds disappear.

 

This one had flowers out of reach:

Now, the untended bush.  It was mostly paperbarks and Banksia, but due to a fire a few years ago, the Banksia forest was thin, most of the trees (shrubs?) obviously young.

First – paperbarks, though obviously, this is a manicured grove 🙂

 

a clutch of wilderness displaying some of the inherent characteristics of the paperbark – chaos and untidiness being the first two I can think of.  Wonderful shapes and shadows, though.

 

 

They look so old:

 

Then we started walking around, hoping to get down to another part of the lake.  On either side we were surrounded by bush – on one side paperbark tangles:

 

 

 

On the other side of the path was a narrow band of Banksia forest & some had flowers high up against the sky.  It was a jungle of thin spindly trunks and striped shadows.  They all looked like the Banksia prionotes, the same as those at the university campus.  They don’t have the same sculptural appearance of the paperbark, but I could imagine, many thousands of years ago, having to be wary of the striped mainland variety of the Tasmanian tiger.  It would’ve moved like a ghost through these:

 

 

  

 

Occasionally, there were other trees amongst the Banksia, some regenerating after fire:

Two groups of ibis flew over us as we walked:

 

and the path walking back to the car gave a different perspective of the trees:

 

There were quite a few dead trees, from previous bushfires.  This one is marked for removal, but there were many of them.  Many fallen as well.  I suppose they are leaving a lot there as quite a few birds use hollows in old trees for nesting, so the more that can remain, the better.  Although it seems full and lush, the bush fringe around the lake is only a 100 meters deep at most, and the birds are dying out because of habitat loss.

We drove around to the other side of the lake.  The reed beds here were very deep so we couldn’t get near the lake and otherwise, the grounds were manicured into football ovals.  But there were trees:

huge paperbarks:

 

 

and there were other trees as well, massive great things:

 

 

and this – probably one of my favourite photos of the day:

Next post – what kitty had to say when I got home 🙂

A long way from Mtlawleyshire #1: Flowers

Today, I went a long way out of MtLawleyShire.  All the way to main campus of Edith Cown University at Joondalup, around 30 minutes north of Perth on the freeway.  I attend the Mt Lawley (& smaller) campus of the university, and have only ever been out here once before, a few years ago.  Joondalup also has a ‘lake’ – even when full it’s barely a metre deep, and at the moment, despite some rain over the last week, it’s far from full.

A friend and I went up to the University, then took a picnic lunch down to the lake, then walked a way around it through paperbark and banksia forests.  There’d been a big fire there a couple of years ago, so it probably wasn’t as thick as it normally would be.  It explains why so many of the banksias were tall and thin rath that old and spread.

I took an awful lot of photos so I’m splitting the post up into #1 Flowers, #2 Lake, #3 Trees.  There might be more, but that’s it for the moment.

First, the flowers.  These are mostly taken in the grounds of the university which has all native species and all Western Australian.  And beautiful.

Grevillea.  These were flowering in the gardens outside the University library.  The yellow-pink ones are absolutely lovely, but I still love the scarlet ones as well.  They, like the banksia, were thick with bees, but even more – these still had water droplets from the morning’s rain.

 

 

 

Banksias. I think they’re Banksia Prionotes. In the next post (or the one after – remember, there are at least 3 posts from my day trip), there are photos of the banksia forest, but the flowers in those aren’t close up.  These were in the gardens of the university.  There’s a bee on the main flower 🙂

 

 

Even when old, when the flower has left nothing but the core, they’re fairly spectactular:

The brilliant soft red of a miniature bottlebrush:

Technically, this is a flower – but of fungus.  It was growing on a stump of a tree on our walk.

Many of the trees were in blossom, but most were out of reach of both me & my little camera.  These were the only 2 I could get, and one of them’s a little fuzzier than it should be 🙂

 

Next post: the lake and after that – trees 🙂