Wildflowers - in your backyard......

Many thanks Stephen

I must buy a reference book (I only have a painting called 'Wildflowers of the Southern Mt Lofty Ranges', by Jan Woodman, for reference.

What is the best field guide/reference book, that covers my part of the world, to buy???

By the way, I found a different variety of Spider Orchid this morning - never seen one before. It does not have the wide purple bit in the middle. Here's a pic.

Cheers, Dalb
Image Could Not Be Found

Hi Dalb

You lucky bugger with those Orchids, they look fantastic.

To help you with the flower identification, you could use any of the follower:

"It's Blue with Five Petals" by Anne Prescott - 2 different books,
Wildflowers of the Adelaide Region and the second book by her, Kangaroo Island Field guide which also covers the Fleurieu, Eyre and Yorke Peninsula's.

The Native Plants of Adelaide by Phil Bagust and Lynda Tout-Smith.


Keep up your great work.

ps We went out to Spring Gully today and I am now in the process of puting names to the flowers, which I will also post soon.



Cheers



Stephen

good luck - ive got several but theres that many flowers none have em all

Is that a nice crop of salvation jane in the for ground !!!!!!

The Flinders are as beautiful as ever. We were there a month or two ago, a bit early for many flowers, but wonderful scenery.

Cheers,

Val,

Thanks RA, a beautiful picture.

Reminds me, I must get up to the Flinders again very soon.

I saw them in massive full bloom around about 1974, and have not witnessed anything like that again, there were absolute carpets of flowers on every hill, even the stony ones. Albeit, many of the blooms were the red wild flax, which I dont think is a native species.....

cheers, Dalb

Hi Brocky,

Thanks for putting this little beauty up. It is a male flower of a Lomandra, probably Lomandra multiflora. Common names include Mat Rush, or more colourfully, cocky's bootlaces. They are very tough little plants. The female plants often have very sweetly scented flowers, so if you are walking in the bush the first thing to alert you to the presence of these plants is a heavy sweet perfume.

Lomandras are related to grass trees, and a larger species, Lomandra longifolia with long strap-like leaves and cream prickly looking flowers is commonly used for landscaping public places, footpaths etc.

Cheers,

Val

Val,

Thanks for the quick indentification.

I'll have to keep my 'nose' open for the female flower.

Cheers

Many thanks for your response Val,

I did not think my pics were good enough for the main blog as I am having trouble getting the focus right - It keeps focussing to ground level and not flower level. Maybe a tripod would help too....

If you think the pics are good enough to put in the main blog then you are very welcome to do so.

Please also see my above response to Stephen with another pic.

I have some more pics and will go through them and post them later when i hopefully will have identified them.

I am a computer neanderthal and, like several others have said, having difficulty managing size reduction. I only use the standard MS office system, but it does appear to give me the pixel option. I notice Stephen talks about reducing to 230Kb and you talk about 800x600 pixels. What is the a relationship between pixels and Kb???
For my post, I did not reduce my size, of about 4meg, and they loaded Ok.

Cheers, Dalb

Hi Dalb,

Pixels and kilobytes - The main problem with using full-size pictures on line is the huge size of the files and consequently the time they take to transfer. No doubt David and Michelle would point to the big storage required too! An image size of about 800x600 pixels (when clicked to expand to that size) gives a good picture such as Steven's big one, and our sunrise ones. At 800x600 pixels the resulting file size is about 100 to 200 kb, which is a fair compromise between picture detail and file size. Steven's 230 kb and our 800x600 pixels are really saying much the same thing.

Without resizing, a 4 Mb file is really about 30 - 40 times bigger than necessary, and takes 30-40 times longer to transfer. (A few people are concerned that their photos might be pilfered for use by advertisers etc - not a problem at the reduced pixel size as it's not good enough for commercial applications. )

A suggestion about focusing - The problem of the camera focusing on the background rather than the subject often comes down to the way the thing is set up and does its focusing. Most can be set to get optimum focus either over the whole image, or just in a small central area. For flowers best to set just for the central area. Also most cameras will usually start by focusing at maximum range then move in closer until they first get a sharp image (which will often be the background). Most though can be set to "macro" or "flower" or something like that and then they will focus by starting close in and moving out until they first get a sharp picture. This is what we need for closeup work. Suggest check you settings and do some experimenting.

Cheers

John