Spring wildflowers in the wallum

Come to the sand country in September. The heath that spent all winter looking starved and grey, hard little leaves on pale sand, is suddenly in flower. Peas and boronias and wattles and ground orchids, hundreds of species in colour at once. Stand still in it and the shock is the sheer number of different things doing it together, on ground too poor to feed a lawn. Look slowly, because every flower on show is a livelihood, and spring is the few weeks when all of them fall due together.

Start with why the crowd is so large. On sand this leached, no plant grows fast enough to overtop its neighbours and shade them out, so the field does not close to a handful of winners; it stays open to a great many specialists, each making its living a slightly different way. The spring flush is simply that permanent crowd all cashing their season at the same moment, which is why the display is at once dazzling and dizzyingly various.

Read the colours as strategies. The grevillea’s curved red spidery flowers are advertisements aimed at birds, promising sugar for pollen carried plant to plant. A heath in bloom is loud all day with honeyeaters holding up their end of it, and worked over again after dark by gliders. The gold-and-red pea-flowers and the hazing wattles can flush so hard because they rent nitrogen-fixing bacteria at their roots and afford the extravagance. The sundews rooted in the wet sand between the shrubs are carnivores advertising for insects even as they trap them, buying with meat the nitrogen the ground refuses to give. Nothing here is decoration. Each bloom is one answer to the question the sand puts to everything rooted in it, how to make a living on next to nothing, and in spring the answers are all posted in the open at once.

Kneel, and a second tier opens at boot height, ground orchids and lilies and the little trigger-plants, flowers you step over without a downward glance. The show has a vertical structure as much as a horizontal spread: nectar held high where the birds work, traps and lures set low where the insects are, the heath’s economy stacked into a metre of air.

The timing itself is nothing special. Lengthening, warming days pull the flowering open in the window after the cold and before the summer wet, the same cue that fires spring in any temperate country.

None of this lasts. Walk in during those few weeks and you are watching several hundred separate solutions to poverty in flower, each one betting that this is the season it pays off. Miss the window and it goes back to looking like nothing much at all.