FLORA OF MY LOCAL (NORTH QUEENSLAND) ‘VILLE – VIII

Preamble

I once heard a local on a Spanish bus proclaim, as we topped a hill, and Barcelona in all its then hundred square miles and three-and-a-half million inhabitants spread out before us, “Es mi pueblo!” My local town is no competition, but it is my “village,” my pueblo, even if tone-deaf founders endowed it with the clanking name of “Townsville,” which I more often shorten to The ‘Ville. This is a series of (brief) blogs about some flora you may chance upon in the The ‘Ville during a calendar year

In my capacious state, “The ‘Ville” lies far north of the state capital, Brisbane, and still well north of Capricorn, the official tropical zone marker, but though it’s now abundantly endowed with palms, The Ville sports no tropical rainforests or overflowing waterfalls. In fact, The ‘Ville belongs in the category of Dry Tropics – that is, its rainfall is a long way from the heavy average needed to naturally support such delights.

Nevertheless, The ‘Ville does have an abundance of flora, native or imported and most months show some of them off to advantage. Note: For The ‘Ville, the traditional four-season year cycle is not only inverted, at least if you live in the northern hemisphere, but also sways in and out of sync with the native seasonal cycle. And that has only two parts, the Dry, and the Wet. The Wet runs optionally from November to February, the Dry has the rest.

July – Into the Brown

It’s now mid-winter ‘Ville style. Overheard comments include, “It’s drying out fast this year,” and, “Winter’s really here,” etc. Winter, in fact, appears to have taken shore leave this year, since even into mid-July we have had only one sub-10degC morning temp, and a lot of cloudy, un-winter-like ‘Ville days.  In among the sprinklers, only some suburban street-sides show it, but out bush, the season underlines itself in shades of bleaching, dusty, paling brown: grass, leaves already, in some deciduous cases, and dust. Sometime soon, most likely, the bleaching horizon skies whose smoke-pall signals, Bushfires now.

For the flora, it’s a also spare season. Perennially, there are the bougainvillea vines, another ‘Ville staple. This is a big well-watered and spectacular one along a neighboring road, for which my phone camera gave up on the color till I doctored it.

Bougainvilleas do come in every shade from this to white, and their thorns are equally ubiquitous. Native to South America, they translate well to the Ville’s tropics, as this one demonstrates.

Now comes another unseasonal flower – Tabebuias, found in almost every ‘Ville suburban street, native to the northern tropics, normally flowering here in September, and like cherry blossom in the northern hemisphere, the harbingers of spring. This year the street-sides are already liberally painted with the commonest sub-variety’s pinkish flowers. Very welcome, in this brown time, but …! Will we get them in spring as well?

Seasonal blossom, more reassuringly, and very much native: the northern wattle was out last month and earlier, but now the main pack are bursting into bloom. Spectacular gold, the national flower, innumerable types, of which these are only two. The first is golden wattle, quite often found in shrub form up here, the second is possibly “Sydney golden wattle,” since it’s been human-planted rather than truly “native” to NQ. Whatever its species, wattle is a floral asset in the brown settings of a ‘Ville July.