Wednesday, 18 August 2010

Succulents

I'm back in cold Geelong after a week of beautiful week in central Australia but with lots of memories and images to sustain me. We live in an amazing country and exploring a small part of it with friends of similar mind was great fun.

We expected to see kangaroos but didn't see any, we expected to see emus but didn't see any. We expected to see lizards but only saw three. We saw very few insects despite the fact that there were so many plants flowering and seeding, we saw very few tracks in the sand and there were birds around but I thought I would see more honeyeaters. It's hard for a fleeting visitor to get a feel for what is 'normal' after a long drought but we got the impression that biodiversity isn't exactly normal in central Australia.

There has been a fantastic new book published focusing on Australian succulents, Australian Succulent Plants: An Introduction by Attila Kapitany, and a webpage that I must explore at  http://www.australiansucculents.com/ but in the meantime here are a few of the succulents we saw around Alice.





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