Flannel Flower
(click on the picture to see how lovely this flower really is)

Don's favourite flower and plant has always been the Australian Native Flannel Flower.

Every so often over the years we would have a hunt about to see if any nursery about had these little plants. They are supposed to be hard to grow and only live a few years...but throw off many seeds...so worth it if you can get them to seed.

We never came across them and than as time passed we sort of forgot... but the flower was always Don's favourite and i know he would have come across it many times as a kid riding his horse around the back of Catherine Hill Bay and in to the bush behind.

So here is the Flannel Flower which I found whilst over at Wauchope. I had gone to the nursery there hoping to find some flowery plant which I could leave at the cemetery so there were flowers there while I was away... (the pot was still there when I got back!)...after buying the pot I looked about some more and here it was The Flannel Flower. Its planted now and thriving...looks like a type of daisy at first but the leaves have a jewelled appearance...

It reminded me for some reason of a poem that all Australian kids of a certain vintage were taught verbatim (long forgotten most of the verses)... a lot of Australian native flowers regenerate quickly after really savage bushfires have swept through...

first a little shoot of green out of the ashes and then in a few weeks apart from blackened trees its green again...especially after rain.

My Country
By Dorothea Mackellar

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins;
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies—
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror—
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die—
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze.
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land—
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand—
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly."