People delight in finding wildflowers all year round in WA

Spotting wildflowers is like second nature to Terry Dunham, as he walks through Gull Rock National Park in Western Australia's south.

"You could walk down here and someone might say; 'oh, there's not much flowering,' but if you look out, the bush is actually full of flowers," he said.

WA's wildflower season generally starts in the northern parts of the state around June, and gets underway further south in later months, running through to about November.

However, if you know where to look you can find some incredible displays all year in the Great Southern area.

Mr Dunham runs wildflower tours in the region through all seasons.

"I always say, WAYinWA, you've got Wildflowers All Year in Western Australia," he said.

"At the moment there's all the beautiful hakeas are starting to flower, the shell orchids and donkey orchids are just starting, it's just beautiful out there, for sure."

Mr Dunham said people looking for orchids needed to be extra careful.

"With Queen of Sheba [orchids], you can have the tiny little spiral leaf that's only a millimetre high and people just ignore it because it's not a beautiful flower," he said.

"But that's the future in 10 years, so if you step on that and squash it, that's gone."

Summer showcase

Botanist Kingsley Dixon said there were about 5,000 species of wildflowers that called the Great Southern home.

"Of those 5,000, there's about 1,800 only grow as unique species in the Great Southern,"

he said.

"They're some of the real show-stoppers such as the Royal Hakea, the Qualup Bells absolute stunners, knockouts found there and nowhere else on Earth."

Professor Dixon said January and February could be just as spectacular as later in the year.

"It's more the scale of the flowering at that time of the year because they're all drawing on special deep water that makes the flowering even more prominent because everything's starting to go to sleep for the big summer drought period," he said.

"So in many respects that sort of mid to late summer can be equally as special."

Wildflower communities

Visitors flock from across the country and internationally to attend the annual Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show, 512 kilometres south-east of Perth.

Organiser Sue Leighton said it was a volunteer-run event that brought the community together, showcasing hundreds of species each year.

"It is known as the biggest wildflower show of its kind in the world,"

she said.

"We have loads of volunteers who do all sorts of things, we need to have licensed pickers, someone just washes bottles."

The venue is also home to Ravensthorpe Herbarium, which began in 1997 with the aim of collecting a sample of every flowering plant in the shire.

Chris Lewis has had a passion for wildflowers all her life, and was part of the team that started a herbarium for Kojonup, 300km to the west of Ravensthorpe.

"We had a wonderful wildflower display for a number of years, and when that first started people brought in plants from all over the place," she said.

"We had to put names to them, which wasn't an easy job, and I hate to think now exactly what names we put on some of the plants."

Collaborating with Greening Australia, the project continued to expand.

"I think I've collected and documented over 800 [species]," Ms Lewis said.

"But there's still an awful lot out there to go, I think I'm only about a third of the way through."

For each specimen collected and stored locally, another is sent to the WA Herbarium.

"I think it's very important to have a statewide herbarium so that everything goes through there and we know what's growing," she said.

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