Wind and flowers

Another name for the wind flower is the anemone, which must be one of the few flowers we’ve not seen.  Whilst Kim has been impressing people with her knowledge of the Latin names for many of the species, Mike’s categorisation is a great deal less complicated (red, yellow, blue, white and other).  But there’s no denying that the swathes of colour spreading across the fields is a remarkable spectacle.

So we’ve seen the flowers and we’ve also experienced the wind.  Greenhough is the most windy place in Australia and so is much of the nearby coastline.  This is just one of the trees growing almost horizontally as a result of the constant westerly winds.  Vin Rouge was being thrown about in the gusts, which is very unusual as it’s a heavy vehicle, and Mike was getting very fed up fighting the forces of nature.

High winds and roof top tent living are not the best of partners so we diverted inland, passing some 70 giant electric generating windmills at the Walkaway Wind Farm.  Naturally Kim found a lot more wild flowers to stop and photograph along the way.  Edging back towards the coast we reached another of those weird Australian phenomena know as The Pinnacles.  Thousands of naturally occurring columns were once buried beneath layers of sand, but centuries of wind have exposed them and created a sandy desert surrounded by bush land.  The whole place has a strange, almost eerie feel about it.

But the wildflowers beckoned and we wanted a night free from gales and so it was foot hard down to Moora, a small town amongst some hills and out of the wind.  However, we’ve noticed that  the temperature drops quite noticeably each evening now we’ve travelled south and so we’ve reverted to our old favourite central heating system – the hot water bottle.  Tucked under the duvet (called a doona in Australia) it warms the bed.  On top it warms the tent.  A comfortable night results.

The Western Wildflower Farm we found a delight.  Kim was in her element finding about how the flowers were cut, dried and packed before being exported to Europe and Africa.  We even had a free cup of coffee.

The farm, in addition to producing 15,000 acres of flowers, also raises sheep and Mike had the opportunity to get away from flowers for a while to watch the seasonal shearing.  Four shearers were going flat out keeping another four sorting, compressing and packing the fleeces.  It looked, and must be, very hard work.

Our next stop, the Chittering Wildflower Festival at the small town of Bindoon.  The displays were grand and Kim was thrilled to find this specimen very appropriately named the Enamel Orchid.  It really does look as though it has been given a coat of gloss paint.

Mike by now was getting rather ‘flowered out’ and wanted a bit of a change.  The town of New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town having grown from a missionary in the 1850s.  Now largely a tourist attraction with a certain amount of educational content, it proved to be an interesting tour among the European style buildings.  It’s history may be interpreted many ways but there’s no doubt that the Benedictine monks acted on what they thought were the best principles at the time.  We just enjoyed the architecture.  To avoid getting into the dubious subject of religion, I’ll finish here with a fine view of St Ildephonsus College.  No, we don’t know how to pronounce it either!