Wildflower season in the sand country

If you plan one nature outing on the Sunshine Coast around a single event, make it this one. For a handful of weeks from late winter into spring, the white-sand heath that reads all year as low, grey, forgettable scrub stages the biggest wildflower show on the coast, and unlike most of what the bush gets up to, it keeps closely enough to a schedule that you can pencil it into the diary.

It builds slowly. Through August the first wattles haze gold, the wallum grevilleas hang out their curved red spidery flowers, and the earliest peas crack open, a first scatter of colour over ground that still looks bankrupt. Then September and October arrive and the heath ignites. Whole thickets of eggs-and-bacon peas turn yellow-and-red, more wattles follow, pink starry boronias give themselves away by scent before you find them, grass-trees spear cream flower-spikes out of ground that burnt the winter before, and down at boot level sit the ground orchids and the glittering sundews. Come at the peak and hundreds of species share a patch of sand too poor to feed a lawn, and the heath rings with honeyeaters.

The banksias are the conspicuous absentee, and that is worth knowing rather than glossing over. Wallum banksia flowers from late summer into early winter, hairpin banksia through autumn and the cold months, swamp banksia across summer and autumn — so the spring show goes on almost entirely without them. That is not a gap in the year but the shape of it. The banksias hold up the lean end, feeding the honeyeaters through the months when the heath has nothing else to offer, and spring is the season that can afford to look after itself.

Do not expect a meadow. The wallum flowers as a fine mosaic, and the reward goes to the slow walker, the one who drops to a crouch and finds five species in a square foot where the passer-by saw only grey scrub. Local field naturalists run guided wildflower walks through these weeks for that reason: the flowers are small, scattered, and easy to miss at speed.

The trick to finding the best of it runs dead against instinct: make for the poorest ground. Why that works is argued out elsewhere, and in the field you can take it on trust. Head for the sand-country reserves, Cooloola and the heath of Noosa National Park above all, and walk the most bleached sand you can find. That way you step into the thick of the flowering and not its thin edge.

Two cautions travel with the timing, because both will move the show. The first: it runs on the weather, not the date. A dry or cool spring flowers thin, a good one gloriously, and the peak drifts a few weeks from year to year. Treat the calendar as a cue and the sky as the last word. The second: fire moves the best ground around. Many heath plants, the banksias and peas above all, flower hardest in the year or two after a burn, when the opened, ash-fed ground gives them their moment, and the grass-trees will spear a recently burnt hillside into bloom. So the grandest wildflower patch this spring may well be one that went up in smoke two winters back. And none of it lasts. A given patch holds its peak a week or two and then greens over, so a fortnight’s difference in when you come can be the gap between the show and its aftermath. Ask a ranger where the country last burnt, and more often than not you are asking where to find the flowers.