Ben Cruachan – natural history

I guess that while the main focus of a plant man is adding new species to his tick list, another equally interesting sideline is finding flowering plants that exhibit significant variation in flower colour, or structure, eg double forms. This facet always reminds me of Bill, who was always on the lookout for unusual plants to bring into cultivation. If the normal flower colour was white he wanted a pink one, and vice versa, and if he could find a double or semi-double form, so much the better. I remember once we were hiking back across the Crosscut Saw after a rugged trip beyond Mt. Speculation, when I chanced upon some low-growing shrubs of Crowea exalata, normally a pink flowered member of the Rutaceae, but there alongside the pink plants were a couple with snowy white flowers. I took a few cuttings and put them into a container with a little water to keep them fresh until I got home and took them out to Bill. I can still remember asking him if he’d like some cuttings of a white crowea, “Oh, yes please” was the rejoinder with a quiet smile, he propagated them and it eventually went into the nursery trade and I used to see it in the nurseries some years later.
This post was prompted by some old slides of white-flowered plants I found over the years, and funnily I can remember the location of each as if it was yesterday, even though up to forty years has passed as in the case of this one, a white Hyacinth Orchid.

This common summer flowering orchid is of course normally rosy pink, and this was the only white form I ever found. Unfortunately it was obliterated when the council decided to reform the road and covered it with three feet of earth.
Fast forward forty years, Gouldiae and I are photographing spider orchids at Crinigan Road Reserve, and lo and behold there are two white-flowered plants amongst the dozens of normal ones.

One of our most charming small spring wildflowers has to be the pink fringe lily, Thysanotus tuberosus, and I found a wonderful colony once where the Mount Angus track forks to head down to the Avon River. And what was in amongst the drift of pink? yes, a gleam of white.

Up on Bullockhead Track one day while admiring the massed display of pink tetratheca on the bank, a white one too, and just off Ridley’s Track a white-flowered plant of the usually rich purple Hardenbergia violacea, the latter to go into cultivation too.

The Grass Triggerplant, Stylidium graminifolium is widespread from the alps to the coast where some wonderful displays can be seen in the sandy heath country. The Marlo district is no exception, and there used to be a great show on a bank outside the CFA shed until it was slashed out of existence. Before that happened the highlight was a number of white plants amongst the pink, this photo is now all that remains, a sad but familiar story.

The foregoing are not all the white-flowered variants I’ve found over the years, but I think are enough to illustrate what floral delights there are to find if we keep our eyes open, so I’ll just finish this post with a link to a recent post where the white form of Boronia ledifolia is pictured with the normal colour form.