It's time to talk about tiny little vines, the ones you walk past a thousand times without noticing, the ones that rarely flower and so have few or no 'points of interest'. They are so important to local ecologies and are significant components of biodiversity. And yet it can take a long time to get your eye in and see them.
It takes time, but it is so worthwhile to see these beautiful little plants making their way among the tall trees or spreading out to cover bare earth recently denuded by flood waters. Seeing the detail is one of the big benefits of regular bushland wanders: what it does to your mind and your sense of place as you see more and more of what's there and what's happening, not just the big-picture elements.
It's hard to describe the gradual process of connecting with, or relating to, or becoming immersed in nature in a particular place, but it is an experience that can be eye-opening and profoundly moving. Attending to what you see, immediately before you and over time as you go back to a place again and again, is for me a really important part of the process.
For example, the largest and most dominant plants, normally trees, that are characteristic of any area and used as a shortcut to describe its ecology, are typically much less numerous and diverse than the ground covers: the ferns, grasses, herbs, forbs, and other little things.
So back to the tiny vines. There are dozens of different species. I've featured the Bearded Tylophora (Vincetoxicum barbatum) and the Love Creeper (Glycine species) before, but just in the pea plant (Fabaceae) family there's half a dozen more, and they're readily seen in local wet sclerophyll forest and grassy woodland.
These little beauties won't dominate an area and when they're in flower, if you lean in really close, they're just absolutely adorable, with pinks and purples and yellows galore.
The yellows are represented by one of the smallest and hardest-to-find tiny little climbers, Zornia. Sprawling along the ground, and more typically considered a ground cover, but sometimes scrambling up into nearby shrubs or trees, its yellow pea flowers are incredibly cheerful when you actually get to see them.
These tiny little Fabaceae-family climbers have the added benefit that they fix nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants that most plants can't generate for themselves. So when a plant dies its decomposing body returns nitrogen to the soil, making it available to other plants that can't fix nitrogen for themselves. That's an awesome biodiversity bonus of these little plants, on top of their intrinsic appeal.
Keep an eye out for them any time you're in your local patch of bushland, growing low or medium or high.
