But even for those of us for whom a forest is an evergreen swathe of sun-dappled olive-grey, with leaves crackling beneath our feet, where kangaroos are as common as sheep and spring is welcomed by the guttural cries of koalas screaming from their treetop eyries, Western Australia stands in a class of its own.
On the edge of one of the most isolated continents, Western Australia has been doubly isolated by the great inland – sometimes a sea of desert, at others a sea of salt water – a barrier for plants and animals alike. And the inhabitants of Western Australia have been freed to generate their own remarkable individuality.
This biological trait particularly applies to the south-west corner, the Kwongan, a biodiversity hotspot home to an astonishing level of endemicity. Of the 7239 plant species in the area, 80 per cent are found nowhere else in the world. And they are not only unique, but very often spectacular. With their specific adaptations to Western Australia’s poor sandy soil, these species are often unwilling transfers to the heavy clay soils of the east coast – much to the despair of envious eastern gardeners.
A few years ago I drove up the coast from Perth with a friend, past endless flapping fence banners proclaiming the imminent arrival of new housing estates. The skimpy banners failed to conceal the brutal clearfelling: charred sandy soils churned with the jutting bones of burnt vegetation, now exposed to blistering sea winds. It looked like Armageddon: a battlefield for the end of times. The encroaching suburbs crept like a concrete cancer along the coast, encasing the shoreline in cul-de-sacs of mind-numbing modernity. We detoured onto the inland road, where the scenery was softened with greenery. The remnant forests sheltered modest shacks. They felt more honest, less excessive. The roadside vegetation whizzed past as we continued north.
‘What is that?’ I’d ask, as another strange plant flung past at breakneck speed.
‘How would I know?’ my American travelling companion said. ‘Want to stop?’
We huddled by the road, rocked by road trains as they hurtled north, lost in a wonderland of Dr Seuss creations. We consulted phones and brochures. Nothing looked like it should. I felt my biologist’s credibility slipping. Closer inspection revealed subtle similarities to familiar eastern forms. Grevilleas, acacias, eucalypts, but with strange protrusions, great spiked flowerheads, rounded, elongated, smoothed, as if Nature had stretched herself to produce the greatest possible diversity from the simple palette she had been given to work with.
Western Australia’s biodiversity is exceptional. Even the standard brown mammals take astonishing forms here. Is it possible for any creature to be cuter than the tiny brush-tongued honey possum or the stripy ant-eating numbat? It’s as if the animals do battle to be as interesting as the plants. As if the plants are inspired to reach great aesthetic heights by the spectacular beauty of a landscape strung with red cliffs, ochre sands, blue lagoons and pink lakes. Only the developers remain blind to such natural wonders.
Western Australia boasts many wonderful orchids famed for both their beauty and great size.
Edith was charmed by the thick and fleshy greenhoods, with strange ‘horns’, striped in red and dark green. The spider orchids (Caladenia excelsa) grow to an astonishing size.
‘One beautiful specimen which I received is 3ft high,’ Edith declared, ‘and the septs of the huge “spider” flower are more than 6 ½ in. in length, making a spread of more than 13in – A gargantuan spider to dream of!’
But even Edith found a giant Western Australian leek orchid a little challenging.
‘The dark purple stem, which is as thick as my thumb, bears 42 expanded flowers and 28 buds! Lying on a light coloured table, the monster looks unpleasantly like a black snake,’ she said, adding in concession, ‘although its individual flowers are decidedly handsome.’
Surely Edith’s connections with Western Australia are due to her brothers. First Harry, then Hervey, moved to Perth. And in 1930 Harry brought his father Henry, suffering from dementia, back to Western Australia to live with him. If her brothers sent her material on the local flora from time to time, Edith does not mention it. Perhaps Harry put her in touch with local naturalists, or encouraged them to write to his sister about their queries. Or perhaps not. I can find no mention of her siblings in any of her writing.
One of the great beauties of orchids is not so much in what they display, but in what they keep secret. In June of 1928, a Western Australian farmer at Corrigon, Jack Trott, bent to investigate an odd crack that had appeared in his garden. A sweet smell rose from the crack and, as he pushed the soil away, he uncovered a tiny white flower, no more than an inch and a half across, growing entirely underground.
‘What is generally regarded as the “flower” of the orchid somewhat resembles that of a cactus,’ clarified Edith, ‘but the apparent “petals” and “sepals” are really only modified leaves, or bracts, forming a cup which contains the real orchid flowers, groups of tiny purple orchids of simple structure.’
The fact that it had no green leaves suggested to Edith that it had ‘a tale of lowly origin, perhaps of depravity’, since without green chlorophyll, the plants cannot generate their own food and must rely instead on a symbiotic relationship with fungi. And indeed, this orchid Rhizanthella gardneri hosts a mycorrhizal fungus, which draws nutrients from nearby broom honey myrtles. As it is pollinated by underground insects, like termites, it has no need to break the surface, attracting them instead with its powerful scent.
Although this strange orchid is endemic to Western Australia, and found in just a handful of locations even there, its habits are not unique. In 1936, Dorothy Coleman discovered Sacrosiphon rodwayi (now known as Thismia rodwayi) on a ramble through the Sherbrooke forest, the tiny ‘little amber and red lanterns, two-thirds of an inch high’.
