Christmas Bells of The Apple Isle

You stumble across a flower in the Southwest National Park and stop to admire the clusters of bright red-orange bell-shaped corolla tubes atop a long stem. Corolla is the word used to describe the faded baby-blue car my mum used to drive, but it’s also the botanical term for a flower’s petals as a collective. And just like with cars, the colour and shape of a flower can offer hints to who the owner is trying to impress.

In mum’s case, I can assure you the car was impressing no one… But the bright red and yellow flowers of the Christmas Bells (Blandfordia punicea) are particularly attractive to pollinators who rely on sight to interpret the world. So, the fact that you’ve also spotted this flower is all part of its cunning evolutionary plan.

You resist the urge to pollinate this flower (that’d be a bit awkward) and instead start to ponder its shape. If we push the metaphor toward the 60s cliché that sleek cars attract birds, we start to realise that the same goes for flowers. Many slender bell-shaped flowers have evolved along with birds to form a mutually beneficial relationship. The tasty nectar is deep within the flower and isn’t accessible to everyone. Luckily for them, the honeyeaters have a strange, long brush-like tongue perfect for collecting the tasty goodness, all the while inadvertently covering their head in the pollen that will pollinate the next flowers they visit.

So, you move in closer, thinking you’d love to see evidence of this bird-flower relationship, but your presence means there’s not much chance of it happening. Instead, you pull a rolled up issue of Australian Plants from 1992 out of your back pocket (you knew you’d need this one day!) and find the article about Blandfordia punicea flowering in the National Botanical Garden’s Rockery Garden! Here the “honeyeater birds are regular visitors to the flowers, providing an added attraction to the rockery.” So, birds probably do pollinate this flower. Nice!

Popping your magazine away, you admire the flower anew and three more clues reveal themselves. The lack of scent. The contrasting colours. And the thickness of the petals. All these features point to a flower that isn’t wanting to waste energy using scent to attract animals, instead it’s adding a visual clue to the whereabouts of the nectar and making sure it’s strong enough to handle the rough and tumble that comes with bird pollination.

Now, in your mind’s eye, you slice a diagonal line from Rocky Cape on the north-west coast of Tassie, to Bruny Island on the south-east coast, and you have a piece of island in your left hand. It is on this chunk of island that you stand. And you’ll tell your friends that it is within the heathlands of this section that they’ll want to visit to see the Christmas Bells flower for themselves, from Spring till summer’s end.

Enjoyed this article? Use the icons below to share it with your friends!
Like what we do? You can support us by buying a patch or sticker from our online store.