Into the Wild West: Perth, WA

The featured image is a sculpture  honoring the businessmen who developed Perth 175 years ago. The Central Business District is intensely civilized, incorporating the earliest architecture into state of the art modern building design.

After 24 hours of travel from Muscat through Dubai, I landed in Perth yesterday at 1:30 am. After sleeping for 7 hours, I  awakened refreshed at 11 am Perth time and set about my usual get-to-know-a-new-place routine by taking a Red Bus orientation tour around the city. Then I spend the rest of my time going back and investigating the places that caught my attention.  King’s Park is enormous, so driving through it on the bus I saw more than I possibly could on foot, although I did hop off and walked 45 minutes to the next hop on point. Here is Perth City and Swan River from atop King’s Park:

And here is a 750 year old Eucalyptus tree.  They can live 2,000 years.

Caught the end of someone else’s guided tour and heard the guide say that all of the plant and tree species in King’s Park are indigenous to Western Australia and are found nowhere else.  Little blooms here but there were a few interesting flowering shrubs and trees.

This  is beaufortia aestiva  commonly known here as “sand bottlebrush.” For you gardeners, it is related to the myrtle family.