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

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.

September – First Month of Spring or, um …

It’s officially spring in Australia, and down south in the temperate zones they are winding up for all the conventional imported European flowers, culminating in Canberra’s renowned Floriade festival, opening on September 12th.

Up north, spring is more ambiguous. There aren’t many flowers, especially not European spring flowers, like tulips. One exception is that Ville stalwart, the year-round bloomer, known here as the desert rose, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, and designed for desert or sub-desert water conditions, as you can see from the bulbous roots on this lot. Potted, or bedded en masse, as here, they are a perpetual source of colour for the Ville gardener.

Elewhere, however, the smoke of fires continues to haze the sky, the grass is either sprinklered or dead, and the trees are contradictory, as in this photo.

As here, there are deciduous versions now leafing out new, and there are others, native or imports like the raintrees, dropping every leaf for the month.

There also a number of trees spectacularly flowering for the season, such as this world-tropical native, the variegated coral tree. Seen here in a small version in my local park, but spectacular, for this season, definitely.

Equally notable is the native kapok tree – there are several versions, one of which was newly planted in reclamation sites on Castle hill, but these abound through the town, highly visible in September, when, like the Bombax, they drop all their leaves and spring into striking flower.

The final flowering notable is an Eastern Australian native, known here as the black bean tree, much planted in public areas like parks, less often in house yards, since like this one, they can grow to a considerable size. They supply another, welcome source of colour in the – sort of – tropic spring.

(Note: this morning the weather had changed sharply. There are clouds. There are showers on the radar. [Not likely in The Ville, but around us, there may actually be the break-of-season rain that can appear any time from now till Christmas, though hopefully not later than end of October.] There’s a feel in the air that announces, however prematurely: Hey, the Dry is getting ready to leave.)