Eva's track and its flowers.

There are a few drawbacks with this track, like its soggy nature, so wear good boots. Also, there are said to be a few red-bellied black snakes, and while people have told me the ones around here are quite shy, the ones I know best are from New England, and those can be quite aggressive. I threw a stick off to the right, which shouod make a shy snake go to the left. This one dashed to the right, and chased a second stick further, at which point, we skittled through.

If you live near where I do, you can find this bush track, but only friends get the map, because there are flower thieves about. If you Google it, you can find it, but thieves are low on Google fu. This walk has drops and rises and mud that I can manage without a pole, and I have passed four score years. Still, being cunning, I will take a pole hereafter.

The track takes its name from a Silesian lady, so Eva more or less rhymes with never. Apparently, she loved the wildflowers there, and a good friend told me to watch out for orchids, just before she showed me this one on another track: it is a sun orchid, Thelymitra, and most of them are still in bud.

This orchid may be on Eva's track, but I was on my own, and watching my step carefully (concerned about falls and snakes), so I missed seeing any orchids, but, there were two species of Boronia, first B. pinnata, and then the one that gets stolen, B. ledifolia.

The track has a mix of environments, some of them quite soggy, and two entry points, one near my home, and the other requiring an agile duck under the water pipeline, and you need to know where to duck under, so try the other entry first, or apply a keen eye as you wander along beside the pipeline.

Another flower of note on this track is Dampiera stricta, small and sort of blue-mauve, I think (I am colour-blind, so check the picture on the left).

In September, as I write this, they fill in the expanses of green, and the plant is also popular in gardens. The petal pattern tells us it fits into the Goodeniaceae, the family that takes its name from the Goodenia.

Then there is the dogrose, Bauera rubioides, with its characteristic downcast flowers, and I seem to recall having a saccharine children's book about some sort of terrible shame being brought down upon the flower. It maust have had a happy ending, but I would happily see all authors who write simpering tales of anthropomorphism brought to an unhappy ending.

Anyhow, the plant is quite widespread, but not all that common. On the left, Burchardia umbellata is pretty enough for some to count it as an orchid, which it is not: it is in the mostly African family Colchicaceae.

It gains a common name: 
milkmaids

The ti-trees (pronounced and often written as tea-trees), are in the genus Leptospermum , in the family Myrtaceae. There are various myths about early scurvy cases in 1788 being treated with tea brewed from their leaves, but my book Australianisms, which looks at when terms came into use in Australia, has tea-tree as a medicinal only in the 1870s.

On the right, this is Leptospermum squarrosum, the Pink Ti-tree. So: there are some pretty flowers to see on Eva's track, and I never saw a snake: as I walk lightly, that makes the risk of you encountering one even less,