It’s easy to forget how much I love going for a walk in Lane Cove National Park, the closest national park to where I live. It has been a while since I did go down there and I’m so glad that I did! Spring is always a lovely time of year and today was no exception. All the way along my walk, there were flowers everywhere which was really nice to see.
Flowers include the lovely yellow flowers of narrow-leaved drumsticks (Isopogon anethifolius), written about here: https://flat-cap-gardener.com/2025/04/26/narrow-leaved-drumsticks-isopogun-anethifolius/ if you are interested.
There were plenty of pink flowers on show today too. These belong to the river rose, or Bauera rubioides which I will write about within the next week or so.
Nest up have to be my favourite flowers of the whole walk. They were everywhere. These delightful flowers, pictured below, belong to Gary spider flower, or Grevillea buxifolia. Another new species, another to learn about and that’s something I enjoy almost as much as I enjoy looking at plants.
These pretty, pea-shaped flowers belong to poor man’s gold, Gompholobium pinnatum. The yellow flowers are bright and colourful against the mostly green and brown surroundings. Again, another new plant for me to learn about-I think I’ll be busy this week!
Walking along the fire trails today was rally nice. I couldn’t hear the usual noise of the streets surrounding the national park today, which is unusual, but mad the walk even more pleasant than usual. In th picture below, I saw this wattle (Acacia sp.) with its seed pods forming. Being in the same, and rather diverse, family as peas and broad beans, their pods look very similar.
On of the things that I love about walking through the national park is the fact that you can’t see any sign of human habitation. Considering the fact that Lane Cove National Park is within a fairly central area of Sydney’s northern suburbs, that is a great thing to me (especially as Sydney is a city of over five million people). It is usually fairly empty of people where I go walking in it too. Apart from one distant electricity pylon, there is no major sign of people in the photos below.
On my hours walk through the national park today, all I had around me was the small of spring, the sounds of birds and plants. Despite the humidity and cloudy skies, it was a very pleasant morning for a walk in one of my favourite places to be.