Southwestern Australians

[Diane Whitehead]

I will be giving a talk in a few days and find I have not identified
all my pictures.  I thought of using these, but have no idea what
they are.
Well, if I look through enough books, I can find the
names.  The white one is Milkmaids, a Burchardia, and the yellow
and white, thanks to Lesley, is a Conostylis.

[Diane Whitehead]

another

[Lesley Cox]

Can't help at all sorry Diane. They look nice but most Australians in New Zealand are from the east or south east.

[Lesley Cox]

Perhaps the yellow is a Conostylis, which I suggest as I can see hairiness on the flowers. Just remembered I had a book of Western Australian Wildflowers, by one M K Morecombe. Though it has gorgeous pictures, there's nothing at all like any of yours, except I did wonder if the white could be a Verticordia. Fermi or Rob in Tasmania would be better able to help.

And in fact, it seems we do, in NZ, have a lot of WA flowers growing here.

[Diane Whitehead]

Thanks, Lesley.  I just looked up Conostylis and it does look like one.

[Diane Whitehead]

I found the white sphere - a Dasypogon.  I thought it had a similar
look to Xanthorrhoea, so I looked up it up, and there was mine on
the same page.

One more to go.

I do much better at identifying my plants when I am driving around
North America.  I take my computer and a stack of books, and I
label all my pictures every night.

When I fly overseas, I don't take even a laptop, and I can't take many
books (all that glossy paper in the flower and bird books makes them
really heavy).  Then I return home, full of good intentions, but also
need to catch up on everything that should have been done while I was
away.  And then I forget until someone asks me to speak.

I'm not sure how to solve it, though I did a bit better on my latest African
trip.  I took a tiny whiteboard and a marker.  I wrote the plant name
and photographed it just before I started photographing the flowers.  That
worked sometimes, till I didn't know the name, or it started to rain.

[ranunculus]

I took a tiny whiteboard and a marker.  I wrote the plant name
and photographed it just before I started photographing the flowers.  That
worked sometimes, till I didn't know the name, or it started to rain.

You paint an amusing image, Diane ... a water colour!!!   

[Diane Whitehead]

One taken before the rains started.

[Diane Whitehead]

Well, my desire to grow these plants has been re-ignited by looking through
all my photos.  I just received a box of 96 packets of seeds from Silverhill
in South Africa.  I think it is long since time that I put in an order to
Nindethana in Australia.

However, I can't order without names, I've browsed my 25 Australian books,
and here are two I can't find.  I thought one might be a Croninia, but I can't
find much information about that genus.  It is interesting in bud, and I thought
it might be one of the Hakea/Melaleuca clan, till I noticed a few open flowers
at the end of those spiky tubes.

[David Lyttle]

The western Australian flora is not from this planet. Try Pimelea for the the fuzzy pink tubes though it is a guess on my part.