CHOCOLATE LILIES – YUM

What an excellent idea, lilies that smell like chocolate.

Or vanilla, or caramel, depending on your sense of smell (or lack of it, in my case, thanks to allergies).

Something to make you smile, anyway.

When I saw the first glimpse of purple in the long grass, I thought it was Paterson’s Curse ( echium plantagineum), a European exotic which we’ve been working on controlling because it’s toxic and invasive.

The lilies were identified by the lovely Barrie Ridgway who was visiting and taking photographs.  His blog “Our Fragile Earth” at barrieridgway.wordpress.com uses prose poetry to describe some of his experiences with wilderness, plus poem poetry as needed.  Really beautiful.

I was a bit mortified, though, that when I took him to show off some of my revegetation areas, the new trees had mostly disappeared under a huge crop of wild oats and other weeds.

Despite the weeds, the seedlings are thriving.

Trying not to be too discouraged by the extent of the wild overgrowth, we went down to the area of the box-gum woodland  paddock closer to the Mullion creek, which I know has a greater proportion of native vegetation.

Sure enough, as we got down towards the most inaccessible corner, the wild oats mostly disappeared in favour of tufty native grasses, and some native wildflowers, including the chocolate lilies (dichopogon strictus).  There were also native bindweeds (geranium solanderi) and native geraniums (geranium erubescens).

Unfortunately, on his way home, Barrie’s car got in a fight with the (aptly named)  Glenrock Road  and a stone cracked his petrol tank.  Yass Valley Council had just graded the road, but as usual, their standards are not really safe for a two wheel drive car.  Er, otherwise a good day.