Plants, Plants…and more Plants!

Callitris endlicheri – The ‘pines’ the Burrowa Pine National Park is named after

Johnno is a botanising bicycle rider and regardless of where he’s studying the surrounding vegetation. For the first couple of days of the ride we were travelling through predominantly modified agricultural landscapes so there was a limited amount of botanical interest – We still saw some great things with the Old Man Sneezeweed perhaps the highlight! The Burrowa Pine NP was an entirely different proposition. This park is of great botanical significance because of the number of rare and threatened plant species growing there including a number of things that only occur within the park and nowhere else! Johnno was completely in his element – with Mark and Jeff kindly countenancing his compulsive plant obsessions! During what was a pretty short walk to Campbell’s lookout (and a bit further on) we discovered plant rarities and other extraordinarily interesting wildflowers, but we what we were really seeking to find were the Cypress Pines that the park was named after, which we could see as significant stands on an adjoining spur but had remained elusive on this side of the park. We eventually ‘encountered’ the pines on a rocky rise at about 850 m elevation and what a sight this was – we were transformed into a landscape that looked more like an area of northern hemisphere wilderness, rather than the Australian bush. On this little rocky rise was also the endangered Broad-leaved Hop Bush and a number of other botanical curios.