Philotheca Rutaceae

For all of the avid blip botanists out there I know what the beautiful little star like flower is that I blipped yesterday.  It's a Philotheca salsolifolia, a shrub to 4 feet, flowers pinkish mauve.

According to my book "What wildflower is that" it's a member of the Boronia family and is closely allied to the Wax Flower, Eriostemon, but differs chiefly in the united stamens!!  It describes it as being a shrub with small leaves (tick), it's 5-petalled, yellow to pink or mauve (tick), starry flowers produced at the ends of the branches (tick).   On top of all of this evidence it looks like it in the photo!!

We returned to photograph the shrub on our walk today.  I wanted to show you the flower in it's natural environment.  As you can see it was very bright and it's hard to tell from the image the true colour of the flowers.  We did see another shrub not too far from this one but that was it.

It would be so easy to simply walk past this shrub and never realise just how magnificent the flowers are.  Thankfully someone invented the macro lens :-)