According to a wonderful book, Jewel in the Crown of Global Biodiversity Hotspot, there are over 280 species of stylidium - these pretty flowering plants which comprise one of Australia’s largest genera. And guess where most of them are found?
Yes, that’s right! Here in Western Australia’s southwest and great southern regions we can find 70% of them!
I first came across them along the edges of the Cape to Cape track in mid November when they really stand out because many of the other wildflowers have started to die back. The flowers are small and made up of four petals but the plants come in different forms. Some flowers are on long stems swaying above the green tufts of leaves close to the ground, some present in rosette-shaped clusters, some are bulbs that shoot of a single tiny flower straight through the ground.
They are mostly perennials and flower generally around spring, although they can be seen in flower through the summer (I have seen them in January in the Fitzgerald River National Park), and one species, Stylidium repens, flowers all year around.
What makes them so unusual is the anatomy of their flowers (see above). The flower column (labellum) is activated when an insect lands on it, and through a fast trigger motion in catapults pollen onto insects. Even more fascinating is that different species can cohabitate in the same area because the positioning and length of the floral column varies on each species so that the pollen lands on different parts of the insect and so there is little overlap in the pollination ‘niche’.
Below are some of the beauties I have captured over the last four years.
