Yes, it's definitely spring, whatever the calendar says.
So many of the springtime-flowering plants are in flower, St Andrew's Cross spiders are making their webs around the place, lynx and crab spiders are starting to stake out the unfurling Flannel Flowers, and the Fan-tailed Cuckoos have arrived; you can hear their 'tired postie's whistle' call drifting through the air in woodland and forest. (As an aside, that description of their call is one I remember reading in an Australian bird identification book many years ago, and it made sense to me at the time, but I can't recall ever seeing – or hearing – a postie blowing a whistle of any kind. I wonder what the description means to younger generations?)
One of the most spectacular local shrubs is among the plants in full bloom at the moment. The Springbrook Wedding Bush is famously associated with the Springbrook National Park in the north of New South Wales. But there's a few local records of this beautiful species from the Kiama local government area, well south of its main area of occurrence.
It's a moderately dense shrub, reaching maybe 3m high at most, but often smaller. Here's one doing its thing in our Mount Pleasant garden, covered in flowers and just waiting for bees and other insect pollinators to visit.
The flowers are the thing with this species. They can be very numerous in a good year (this year is pretty good) and are larger and showier than many of the local shrubs.
Its relative, the Wedding Bush (Ricinocarpos pinifolius), is very common in cultivation, and known for its pretty white flowers, but the Springbrook Wedding Bush's flowers are larger and have a bit more colour to them too. And while regular Wedding Bush grows in coastal heath on sand dunes or on sandstone-derived soils, Springbrook Wedding Bush is a more adaptable species and can cope with a fairly wide range of habitats and conditions.
Bonus fun fact: this species has clusters of flowers of mixed sexes. Each cluster generally has a single female flower and up to about five male flowers. You have to look pretty closely to tell the difference!
