MY LIFE WITH PLANTS: Western Australia

Jim Bishop
5 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 21 hours ago

By Jim Bishop, for Let's Talk Plants! November 2025.

For years after a road trip that Scott and I took in Western Australia back in 2016, I'd wanted to return. I was totally blown away by the plants, scenery, animals and open spaces. (You can read my posts from that trip here: https://mylifewithplants.blogspot.com/search?q=Southwest+australia/ .)

This time since the planning and driving was somewhat difficult, we decided to take a tour focused on wildflowers. We especially wanted to visit Geraldton to see where the Waxflowers, Chamelaucium, and the wreathflowers, Lechenaultia macrantha, grow wild. We also stopped at several other areas with wildflowers, but were somewhat disappointed on some days when we visited some mediocre private gardens, a cave, a winery and even a truffle farm, all which had few Australian plants. It was a lot of travel and expense to see things that weren't Australian.

Wireless Park

Our first stop was a pocket of protected plants of the western Australia bush growing in a residential neighborhood of Perth overlooking Lucky Bay. My traveling companion, Kathy Asher, and I arrived two days before the tour to have time to spend in Perth and to adjust to the time change with Western Australia, which is 15 hours ahead of us, and after 21 hours of travel time. My partner, Scott Borden, joined us two days later.

Tree-sized Banksias and a grass tree overlooking Lucky Bay.

I had learned of Wireless Park by following several Australian based groups on Facebook.

Not really knowing which direction to go, we started wandering along what looked like trails through the bush. We quickly found some unusual endemic plants. Most notable was the red and green kangaroo paw - which is the floral emblem of Western Australia, a brightly colored pea bush and a sharp-leaved nearly white small-flowered Banksia.

Kathy quickly focused on finding Banksias. She grows many in her home garden in the Claremont neighborhood of San Diego.

Our first Banksia of the trip - red form of menziesii. We'd see countless more from groundcovers to large trees in the coming days.

Banksi blechnifolia on left. Banksia seed pods center and right. Banksias hold their seed in persistent cones on the plant. Some species only release the seed after a fire.

I set off to find terrestrial orchids. I only found one species of donkey orchid, Diuris corymbosa.

It was at this location that we encountered our first grass trees, Xanthorrhoea. At the time, we didn't realize that the small ones we saw in bloom were unusual for the season, and we only spotted a few others. Throughout Australia, we would come across these trees frequently, with around 30 different species existing, though to my untrained eye, they all appeared similar. These trees grow extremely slowly, typically less than 3 inches per year. A plant reaching five feet in height is likely to be several hundred years old. The plants we observed here still retained their 'skirts', but many others had lost theirs due to wildfires, leaving behind a blackened trunk.

In the understory, there was a charming little plant with yellow flowers, Conostylis aculeata. Native only to Western Australia, we encountered it frequently during our trip. It belongs to the same family, Haemodoraceae, as the well-known Kangaroo Paw.

Another intriguing plant is the Drosera, commonly known as sundew. These carnivorous plants feature sticky extensions on their leaves that capture and digest insects. They typically thrive in nutrient-poor soils and rely on an insect diet to obtain minerals absent in the soil. There are nearly 200 species of sundews, with the majority found in the southwestern corner of Western Australia.

Left: Anigozanthos humilis, usually under a foot tall with just one inflorescence

Right: Isopogon dubius, usually a small bush with sharp leaves.

These two vibrant plants, native to southwestern Australia, were observed in numerous other wild locations we explored.

There were these colorful murals of native plants on the park buildings.

Kings Park, Perth - The Western Australia Botanic Garden

As previously stated, I had been eager to return to Western Australia since my visit in 2016, and one of the top places on my list was Kings Park. It boasts the largest collection of Western Australian plants globally, featuring over 3,000 native species out of the more than 12,000 species of wildflowers found in Western Australia.

This year is the botanic garden's 60th anniversary.

Kathy and I spent the afternoon there. The following day, we spent the whole day in the park and were rained on for most of it, leaving the park almost exclusively to us. We also enjoyed a private tour of the propagation house, where many new garden cultivars have been developed, especially kangaroo paws in unique colors and the Kings series of Grevilleas. In my home garden, I haven't been able to keep the blue/green kangaroo paws alive for a year, but they admit these are hard to grow even in Australia. I've had much more success with Grevilleas and cultivate many of the Kings hybrids.

A short video of our visit to Kings Park.

The vibrant red and green Anigozanthos manglesii serves as the floral emblem of Western Australia.

I believe the Qualup bell, Pimelea physodes, is among the most beautiful Australian plants. In 2016, we discovered it growing in Fitzgerald National Park on white granite domes that emerge from the South Australia Sea.

We only found this one species of terrestrial orchid, Caladenia latifolia, in the park. We were hoping to find more.

One of the most interesting and spectacular displays in the park is the collection of Banksias. But out in the wild Banksia seems to grow everywhere, often creating forests.

A sampling of Banksia blooms in the park.

As one would expect in Australia there was an impressive collection of Eucalyptus, from forest trees, short trees (called Mallees by the locals), many with impressive flowers and seed pods.

We were hoping to see the fields of pink everlastings, Rhodanthe chlorocephala, that grow north of Perth, but we never found them. Fortunately, there is a large planting in the park. We were fortunate to catch them on a sunny day with the petals open. The other two days we were there, they were closed due to the rain.