Let’s look at Lomatia | Kings and Guitars
A bit of background on Lomatia Lomatia is a genus of plants in the Proteaceae family. Chances are the plants that comes to mind when you think Proteaceae is Protea, Banksia and Grevillea. You would be correct, although the Proteaceae world is much bigger than these three species. There are about 79 genera in all, and majority of them are found in the southern hemisphere. We have about 46 and the rest are found throughout…
Tasmanian Orchids | Caves that are handsome | Tafoni
Tasmania’s orchids | Peter Fehre May’s Tasmanian Field Naturalist Club meeting was one of my favourites to date. Yeah, I am biased, because I love Tasmania’s native orchid population, but then who doesn’t right. We were lucky enough to have Peter Fehre come along and give us a run down on a whole bunch of endemic orchids, who they are, where they live, when they flower and also show us his remarkable photography. Including the…
Omphalotus nidiformis | Glow in the dark fungi
Omphalotus nidiformis, or the ‘ghost fungi’ as it is commonly known, is a species of fungi which is quite often found growing in southern Australia, which of course means Tasmania. Generally found at the base of Eucalyptus or exotic trees on living or dead wood. What does it look like in the day? It is quite a large species reaching up to 20cm in diameter, perhaps even larger. As with most fungi, it depends on…
Aurora | For Evan
Many people know what the aurora is. It’s those lights in the sky! The Aurora Borealis, which is the northern hemisphere version, gets the most coverage. Although this is changing and a lot more people are beginning to realise that it can also be seen in the southern part of the world. The southern most southern parts of the world that is. Such as Tasmania, the south island of New Zealand, and the southern most…
Mount Misery | Still Not Miserable
Tas Field Nats ascend upon Mount Misery What a marvellous Sunday was spent wandering the tracks at Mount Misery with an equally marvellous group of people. The Field Nats last visited Mount Misery in 2018, you can read about it here. That post will give you some info on the walks and how to get there. I won’t bother repeating myself. I’m efficient like that… Back in 2018 I was going through a pretty strong fungi phase. Can’t remember if that was before or after my orchid one. Potentially…
Herbarium | Day Ten
We found this weird Stellaria up in the central plateau a while back. We didn’t really notice it was weird at first. We just kinda went ‘it’s a Stellaria, it’s probably just S. multiflora’ and then moved along looking for what we were there looking for. Which was a Senecio and some Carex. Anyways, I took some photos, because it was really cute and planned to just ID it later. Turns out, that Stellaria multiflora (both subspecies) don’t actually have flowers. Well they do, but they don’t. They don’t…
Brachyglottis brunonis
After years of walking and playing on Mt Wellington, this is the first time I have found this in flower. I remember talking with Mark Wapstra one day in late 2015 whilst on an Orchid foray about this plant. I was learning my Tasmanian plants and wanted something new to go and look for, he suggested this one. On a few occasssions I had gone and had a look, but as it wasn’t in flower it never jumped out at me. To be honest, I probably…