Special to Road Trips for Gardeners
By Experience Perth

The time to check out wildflowers in Perth, Australia, is right now (which is springtime Down Under).

There are more than 12,000 species of wildflowers blooming in Western Australia, from September through November, making it the world’s largest collection in the world.

In the heart of the city, Kings Park offers a Floral Fantasy Festival with the world’s biggest display of WA’s
famous wildflowers from every region of the state with the ‘BlackKangaroo Paw’ being this year’s Feature Flower.

Just a short drive from the city in the Swan Valley wine region, wildflowers can be combined with wine tasting and lunch.

Visitors can also enjoy a range of trails at Whiteman Park displaying the prickly bark banksia, hibberias and grass trees or at Noble Falls Walk Trail which showcases orchids, haekas, grevilleas, isopogons, petrophiles, trigger plants and verticordias.

Further afield in the Perth Hills – a 40 minute drive away – a range of wildflowers and bush tracks can be explored which include the Eagles’s View Walk, Wandoo Heights Wildflower Trail, Bibbulmun Track and the Mount Dale Walk Trail.

These tracks all have wildflowers such as the banksia, wattle, hakeas, grevilleas, dryandras, pimelea, myrtles, trigger plants, kangaroo paw, everlastings, sundews and blue Leschenaultia.

The Blue Rottnest Daisy can only be found on Rottnest Island, a 30-minute ferry ride from the coast. Rottnest Island is also home to more than 1,500 native species of wildflower that can be seen along the 50km Wadjemup Bidi trail.

An hour’s drive north at Yanchep National Park, the rare Yanchep Rose can be found along with walk trails and an array of wildflowers such as the one-sided bottle brush, yellow buttercups, parrot bush and honey myrtle.

(Photo courtesy of Experience Perth)