Desert Pea

We spent a few hours today in one of our favourite plant places, the Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden in Port Augusta, South Australia. The photo is of Sturt's Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa, a spectacular plant of inland Australia. Its first recorded sighting and collecting by a 'western scientist' was in 1699, by the English seafarer ('pirate'?) William Dampier, in the northern part of what is now Western Australia. This was 171 years before Captain Cook 'discovered' the eastern parts of the Australian continent. The common name honours Charles Sturt, a colonial explorer of inland Australia in the mid 1800s.

The extra, photographed in the same botanic garden this morning, is a handsome kangaroo who insisted I take his/her photograph.