It's finally that wonderful time of year when the Purple Coral-pea, aka Happy Wanderer (Hardenbergia violacea) produces its beautiful, bright purple flowers.

Purple Coral-pea is a climber, in the pea or Fabaceae family, and fairly well known in cultivation across its home range in coastal areas across southern Australia. In Illawarra it's widespread in areas of open forest or woodland, on a variety of soils.

You can see it at Wiseman Park in Gwynneville, at Bass Point and it is also present as an unusual form with very broad leaves in the Windang Island area, where it grows in full sun in a very exposed area.

The plant below has been managed in a botanic gardens context, but the photo illustrates its vigorous growth habit and tendency to form a clump or shrubby form when allowed to ramble along the ground. 

Purple Coral-pea is widely used in gardens, typically as a climber, grown up a trellis or gazebo. But it can also be grown as a large, rangy low shrub, as the picture above shows.

With careful pruning (which takes a fair bit of time and effort) it can even be managed as a low hedge. I was astonished to see the below plant, trimmed to a neat 60cm high, in a suburb in Canberra. 

Enough about the shape and habit of this plant; any article on Purple Coral-pea couldn't finish without a shot of the flowers. Unfortunately, the plants I've been seeing lately are not putting on a particularly good show.

Compared with the impressive colour on the Illawarra Flame Trees (Brachychiton acerifolius), they're having a bad year. But this picture taken by Mithra Cox back in 2015 (also an El Niño year) shows a typical flowering.

This is definitely one to enjoy in gardens, as well as in natural woodland and forest areas.  

The photo above is reproduced under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC 2.0