Visiting Australia--Remote, Central, Alice Springs

I knew almost nothing about Australia when I read and loved Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice. So, like generations of tourists, when I visited Australia, I was eager to see Alice. Alice is of course, Alice Springs, a small city in the center of Australia. Australia, the world's smallest continent or largest island, is generally warm and dry. Alice, in the center, is in the middle of the sort of desert where they tell you in October, "before this week, our last good rain was in January."

Visiting Australia--A Few Blue Mountain Flowers

Australian plants are justly famous for being diverse and often unique.

On a trip to eastern Australia in 2015, we hiked between overlooks in Australia's Blue Mountain National Park, west of Sydney. Well, the others hiked, I dawdled, distracted by the plants.

Visiting Australia—Glorious Kakadu National Park

Being in the Southern Hemisphere, the northern end of Australia is the warmest. In the lands east of Darwin on the northern coast, there is monsoon forest. A distinctly Australian tropical forest, very dry part of the year, alternating with periods so wet the low spots all become lakes and the roads disappear.

Kakadu National Park preserves a big part of that region for visitors to marvel at. It is the world's second largest national park and a World Heritage site (for both culture and nature), protecting a complex and diverse place.

Plant Ecology--Tumbleweeds, the Lifestyle

young tumbleweed

In the dry fall of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, the tumbleweeds let go and roll around.  Drifts on fences from the region make dramatic pictures link

While there are plants called tumbleweeds, actually tumbleweeding is something diverse plants do.

Visiting the Southern Hemisphere--Searching for the Southern Cross

Don’t you hang upside down in the Southern Hemisphere? 

It sounds strange to ask that, but since ancient Greece, it has been a recurring question:  how can there be life south of the Equator, if the world is spherical, won't anyone there fall off? 

When experienced, the Southern Hemisphere feels like the Northern Hemisphere.

Tourists at Uluru, Northern Territory, Australia
Nobody falling off.

But because the Southern Hemisphere IS on the other half of the earth from the Northern Hemisphere, the stars are seen from a different angle. Familiar constellations such as Orion hang upside down. But also, the reversed seasons means that Orion is a constellation of summer, when the days are long and star gazing requires staying up late, while Leo, a constellation I rarely see because it is high in the sky early in the night only during the northern summer, is easily seen in the southern winter nights.

And of course, the Polaris, the Pole Star over the North Pole, is hard to see from the Southern Hemisphere, staying low on the horizon, as does the constellation in which it sits, the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor). Conversely, the constellation over the South Pole, the Southern Cross, rises higher and is easier to see the farther south you go.

Travel Story--Botanists Touring Victoria, Australia

Acacia

After the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne Australia in late July 2011, I took a tour across Victoria, Australia. A botanical tour, offered to the Botanical Congress attendees. Consequently, this tour was busload of botanists and their families--14 tourists, two guides and a driver. The tourists were an international mix: Americans, Germans, Austrians, an Estonian, an Australian from Sydney, a Colombian. We found the  native plants enthralling.

Travel Story--Northern Hemisphere Botanist in Victoria, Australia

At the end of the International Botanic Congress in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2011, I took a tour led by two Victoria botanists, Nigel Walsh and David Cameron, showing us plant wonders of southeastern Australia. And wonders they were.

Australia’s native plants are very different from those familiar to me in the United States. First is the Northern Hemisphere-Southern Hemisphere difference: before the age of dinosaurs, the continents, which had been a single entity (Pangea), split. The southern landmass, today South America, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica, remained together as one continent, Gondwanaland, but separated from the northern continents, now North America, Europe and Asia, known as Laurasia. Thus, many of the plants of the continents that were Gondwanaland have been separate from those of Laurasia for 150-175 million years, fully long enough to produce vast differences. There are plant families and lineages within families that are only found in the Southern (or Northern) Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere plants were part of what I wanted to see.