It's Flax-lily season! Tiny colourful explosions of blue and yellow flowers, punctuated by busy insect pollinators and the occasional curious bird.
Blue Flax-lilies (Dianella species) are low, strap-leaved plants that are an absolute staple in local landscaping. In parks and gardens they do sterling duty providing a hardy, evergreen ground cover over large areas, and are fairly anonymous for much of the year.
It's just now in spring – when they put up beautiful spires of blue flowers, with colourful yellow anthers – that they become really obvious. The most common local species is Dianella caerulea and you'll see it everywhere once you start looking. It's in woodland areas, rainforest areas and in council-managed carparks the region over.
Blue Flax-lilies are fantastic habitat plants. I've seen many native bees hanging around them, including Blue-banded Bees (Amelia sp.) and Stingless bees (Tetragonula carbonaria), not to mention assorted Hover Flies. And every now and then I get a real surprise.
This morning I was hunting for good Flax-lily shots, trying to capture the beautiful golden yellows of the anthers in the centre of each flower, nestled among the purple-blue petals. Whoah, this flower was looking really weird! The anthers weren't yellow, they were greenish-white, and much longer than usual. And a really strange shape. It was only with the assistance of my trusty phone zoom that I worked out what was going on. Somehow a little Crab Spider (Thomisidae species) had snuck itself into the centre of a Blue Flax-lily flower, and was impersonating ('implantonating'?) the anthers, waiting for some unsuspecting insect pollinator to fly on by and become... prey.
There are actually several local species of Blue Flax-lily, some more adapted for coastal situations (Dianella congesta) and others more likely to occur on the Hawkesbury sandstone to the west and north of the region.
Each has its own unique features and beauty, and faunal associations. If you're down at Bass Point or Bellambi Lagoon, it's Dianella congesta you're more likely to see. In Wiseman Park in Gwynneville you'll probably spot Dianella longifolia with its much longer leaves and finer appearance.
Botanists who pay attention to the fine details are still working out the complexities of the different Dianella species. But wherever you live, if you've got a spot of land to grow a few plants, Blue Flax-lilies are understanding species that will reward you with colourful flowers and fruit, and help support local fauna too.
