Flora of The (North Queensland) ‘Ville – III

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.

Still Splashing – February

Third month of summer and The Wet, and even my drier suburb has had a good amount of rain, including some Real Heavy stuff round New Year. There was also a somewhat squibby cyclone, that headed straight here, became a Category 2, then slipped south and shrank back to a Category 1 even before it hit the coast. Cyclone season runs till late March or early April; may the rest be as quiet as this, says The Ville.

Meanwhile, as with most Wets, the grass has run crazy, so the Cry of the Mower is loud every fine day. Other flora are also making a show. One of these is again, an import, one might be, the third is certainly native, but their antecedents are as interesting as their looks.

The first met my eye on a street my mates and/or I have trotted along almost every week for at least a year. This time the non-descript plant at a drive-head bore not merely a conspicuous, but a wholly unknown flower. White like an Australian Butterfly Bush (more later on that), whiskered like a grevillea, but not a shrub. What on earth could it be?

So I ran a picture through Google Lens, the online go-to botanical reference. Ah, said Google. This is called Cat’s Whiskers, for its very long stamens. A medicinal herb, added Wikipedia, native to China, India, S-E Asia, and, surprise, tropical North Queensland. Hence it might or might not be descended from a native; but it has a string of medical uses mostly connected to kidney or liver complaints. Anddd, a bonus, its nectar attracts butterflies and bees.

I found bulbs for the second some years back, in a kerbside box of Abandoned Plants. Probably a native, I thought, maybe a ground orchid, and stuck them in a tiny bed at my front gate. Somewhat surprisingly, they still flourish. So, casing the yard for blog candidates, I tried a pic of this one too.

This, quoth Google, is an iris,  known as the Leopard Lily, for its spotted flower, or Blackberry Lily for its blackberry-like fruit. The plant was reported native to “Eastern Asia” (including some of Russia), and was used in “traditional medicine.” Russians are rare here, but Chinese miners flocked to the local goldfields along with everyone else, so maybe my plant’s ancestors arrived back in the 1860s too. Wikipedia, however, noted that its prettiness had the plant in Europe by the 18th Century, so mine may have European origins. Whichever, it was certainly a Plant with a Past, to my delight.

Third up is a distinctive tree that flourishes on the rocky northern coast of Magnetic Island, a couple of km out in the bay, our nearest “overseas” travel destination.

The Hoop Pine is definitely native, but it’s also a conifer, from the class of Araucaria. Several such species grow in my neighbouring park, and a local geologist told me that Araucaria are among the oldest trees in the world, appearing in the Jurassic Period, which began some million years ago. I’ve never walked under this Hoop Pine, but the park Araucaria flank the internal path. So each time I pass, I think, maybe a million years past, these trees were growing somewhere on the Australian continent. And whatever has happened since, they, at least, are still here.