I had never thought to look for wild orchids in Helms Arboretum, Esperance. I usually park here for a few minutes when I visit the town to enjoy the parrots in the tall gum trees and to catch a few minutes alone. But having read a blog recommended by Tracy (Reflections of an Untidy Mind), I walked around instead of staying in my car.
Wild orchids love debris of leaves and fallen logs. So do snakes. Dugites look like fallen twigs. They are deadly and agile. Spring time is their time. Maybe that explains why I have never walked around here before. But I was prepared this time for bush walking and dressed in my best protective gear. I stepped off the plane to here.
To the novice, this is just rubble. Not me. My heart raced as I walked around. I anticipated seeing some wild orchids, just as the blog had published.
Soon I found the first orchids. 
Tiny bulbs. I had never seen orchid bulbs before.
The donkey orchids bloomed, stained like tortoise shells, in their hundreds.
Among the grass there were spider orchids.
Oh! so graceful in bud!
When blooming, they danced around, ta da ing their way across grass and rubble.
Their heart, exquisite.
Some bloomed in trios, each more graceful than their neighbour, in still posture.
I headed over to the Lookout where there is a steep gradient over granite rock to bush land below. I’ve found white sugar orchids here before, so I went looking. I wasn’t disappointed!
There were some that were stronger in colour. Each detail so perfect in dusk light.
Others, tinted white.
And others, deep in the bush, barely pink.
I have no other words to describe these orchids, other than ballerinas, because they dance so gracefully, in the breeze.
They lit up my heart, eyes and mind.
Until next time
As always
a dawn bird
PS Thank you Tracy!
With thousands of photographs to catalogue, I don’t know the names of the wildflowers I photograph. Do I really need to? They say what they need to say.
I’ve found a pink banksia cone in a national park in Jurien Bay. They usually range in shades of gold and orange, so a pink one, is sheer delight.
I’m not sure of this plant either that sprouted long prongs of flowers, but I feel I’ve looked right into the heart and found nothing but smaller things that made it bigger.
And, the wild spider orchid, Mardi Gras flamboyant in bloom, always finds a place to perform, in a dense forest.
Much like the kangaroo paw, still, poised in mid-bloom.
Then there are purple flowers, with trails of happy tears, after the rain.
There are others, who make me peer even closer to look at the tinier bloom, within bloom.
There are plain, pristine pure white blooms, like angels that brighten gloom.
Pom poms with individual exquisite flowers, the detail within them, beyond description.
And trigger plants that swing in the breeze, like joyful children, in a playground.
A Shared Space 
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