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Flora of The (North Queensland) ‘Ville – VI
May. 15th, 2026 06:27 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
bookviewcafe_feedFLORA OF MY LOCAL (NORTH QUEENSLAND) ‘VILLE:
Preamble
I once heard a local on a Spanish bus proclaim, as we topped a hill, and Barcelona in all its then hundred square miles and three-and-a-half million inhabitants spread out before us, “Es mi pueblo!” My local town is no competition, but it is my “village,” my pueblo, even if tone-deaf founders endowed it with the clanking name of “Townsville,” which I more often shorten to The Ville. This is a series of (brief) blogs about some flora you may chance upon in the The Ville during a calendar year
In my capacious state, “The Ville” lies far north of the state capital, Brisbane, and still well north of Capricorn, the official tropical zone marker, but though it’s now abundantly endowed with palms, The Ville sports no tropical rainforests or overflowing waterfalls. In fact, The Ville belongs in the category of Dry Tropics – that is, its rainfall is a long way from the heavy average needed to naturally support such delights.
Nevertheless, The Ville does have an abundance of flora, native or imported and most months show some of them off to advantage. Note: For The Ville, the traditional four-season year cycle is not only inverted, at least if you live in the northern hemisphere, but also sways in and out of sync with the native seasonal cycle. And that has only two parts, the Dry, and the Wet. The Wet runs optionally from November to February, the Dry has the rest.
May – Under Way with the Dry
While autumn is more name than season in the The Ville, the Dry is very real. So far, this month is still unusually cloudy, cold is just a thought, and rain keeps getting weather-report mentions, but the general green now is due to irrigation, not showers. My yard grass, hardly to be called a lawn, is showing actual brown.
For the flora, it’s batten-down time. My mother and my maternal grandmother would rotate their annuals around now, from zinnias and gerberas to handle the summer sun, to sweet peas, petunias and pansies for the winter. I’ve actually planted some sweet pea seeds just last week, for old time’s sake, but in the meantime, color in my yard comes from a perennial and an occasional.
The perennial is my red ginger patch, a South Pacific native and another maternal inheritance, which flourishes in my yard’s south-east corner. An old US friend told me that the Chinese say red flowers there mean you’ll never lack money, which I certainly hope is so. In the meantime, the flowers are always an uplift to the eye.
The occasional this month was spectacular: my big cattleya orchid, a birthday present in the ’90s, flourished for years on a log, which eventually disintegrated. A short tour in a purported cattleya pot did NOT flourish, and I finally retrieved a log from one of my own fiddlewood trees. A breath-holding transfer produced this:
But after much cosseting, baby grew roots, and this month, there were not one, not two but four magnificent two-flower sprays, three out at once. From my downstairs work room, it’s been a glorious sight.
Last flora this month hardly deserves the term, since rain trees are almost ubiqitous in The Ville. As immigrants from Central and South America they are now rarely planted, but those established are both huge and magnificent. Their flowers are also pretty and perfumed, but more grateful is their densely foliaged shade, as with this pair.
And when neither damaged nor trimmed, they can also produce a superb shape. A feature of The Ville, though not usually on the tourist lists.
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