The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow. ― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

London’s Blooming sent me to Kerouac and Kerouac started me thinking about the little wildflowers that grow around here in Spring. It’s Autumn now (low floral ebb due to Summer drought), but by late September the woods will be abundantly oversupplied with miniature blossoms of all descriptions: small pea flowers, little daisies, tiny orchids, over a hundred species readily to be found on Ted’s Ridge Track behind the house. None of Queensland’s fabulous, verily Brobdingnagian. blooms for us refined Victorians. No, we go for the little ones: minutely intricate with vivid, dare I say, psychedelic colour schemes.

A friend of mine, whose floral taste runs to giant Rhododendrons and stately Iris, once scoffed at our little lovelies, saying ‘you need a magnifier, just to see them’. But that’s precisely what’s meant by not seeing the wood for the trees. Each little flower, and even Jack Kerouac, is just a turn in the pattern, a thread in the tapestry, a moment in time.