During my cousin Sue’s visit to the mountain, I mentioned the size of poinsettias here compared with those in the UK where she comes from. There, poinsettias are a favourite Christmas pot plant, whereas here, they are shrubs and trees. Today, I determined to tour the mountain in search of flowering poinsettias to make my point. I drove from east to west and north to south on the plateau but did not add to the two plants close to home which I photographed at the beginning of my quest. One was a shrub, perhaps 2.5 metre tall, and the other, a 4-5 m tall tree, its branches cascading over a garden fence. Poinsettias are endemic from Mexico to southern Guatemala. What look like flowers are in fact bracts, most often red, grouped around the flower in the centre, but they can also be cream, pink, apricot, pale green or white.

What is remarkable about the photos I took this morning is that the flowers on the ivory curl or buckinghamia tree in front of the letterboxes of my unit block, were out in Winter, in June 2025, whereas flowering normally takes place in late Summer and early Autumn. The tree was planted more than thirty years ago and has been at its present size for a long time. It is endemic to the tropical rainforest of north-eastern Queensland, at altitudes from 200 to 1,000 m, where It can grow to thirty metres tall, although the tree outside my front door is about fifteen metres high. Part of the tree was broken off by cyclonic weather in 2023 and earlier this year. It flowers abundantly in due season, exuding a sweet, heady aroma. The ivory curl tree has become a popular planting in parks, streets and private gardens in regions far beyond its natural range. It grows well even as far south as Sydney and Melbourne, but only reaches some seven to eight metres tall.

As remarkable as the Winter flowering is the fact that I have not videoed or photographed the tree until now, so that the only… Read Complete Text

This morning I photographed some funnel ant mounds, intrigued by their existence in gaps in the footpath in Driscoll Lane. Such mounds are a typical and frequent sight on lawns and road verges on the mountain after sufficient rain. But these  were in the tiniest of gaps, where a concrete footpath joined a concrete curb beneath the picket fence. The ants had pushed the earth through the gaps, which begs the question of why they did so in a location covered by a hard surface, and the size of any prey which might fall down the funnel. Biodiversity will not be denied, I have seen plants pushing through just such a gap between hard surfaces, morels pushing through a gravel drive and in Holland, hollyhocks surging to their full height in the gap between the edge of the pavement and the front of a house.

I can’t recall when I last photographed two subjects on my morning walk. The first was a fragrant flowering Autumn, evergreen plant at the entrance to a drive. It is native to the Himalayas and grows to a height of three metres. A minute spider was lurking in the folds of a petal of one of the flowers. At the picket fence in Driscoll Lane, my gaze was directed to a caterpillar resting in the shadow of one of the pickets. I emailed two photos to Don Herbison-Evans on May 28. He identified the species the following day. The season suited the plant, but I felt that encountering the caterpillar was a bonus.

On April 30, I took my cousin Sue from the UK, on a walk in Palm Grove. The last time I was in the rainforest (other than visits to Sky Walk) was nearly four years ago. I have avoided going there because the ground has never really dried out after high rainfall and I didn’t want to be leeched, whereas on our night walks I was willing to take the leeches for the party if someone else took the spider webs. We had the good fortune of seeing several pademelons inside the entrance, on our way in and out. A combination of the Christmas 2023 tornado and Cyclone Alfred has severely thinned out the upper slopes next to the path where we began our descent to the shelf land, and the spot occupied by the mighty Moreton Bay fig tree which had been uprooted by ex-cyclone Oswald in 2013, blocking the path. Once the trunk had been cut, the weight of the root ball lifted  the base of the trunk towards its original position, while the remainder stretched for tens of metres across the soil. In 2017 I filmed the unblemished base of the trunk, which, when the root… Read Complete Text