One of the things that I really miss about living in England is autumn. The shift from summer to autumn brings huge changes to natural environment – namely the leaves on the trees turn from green to yellow to reddish orange to brown and then fall. We don’t have that here as Australia’s native forests don’t have deciduous plants due to the milder winters. Yes the trees drop their leaves when they become heat stressed, but you don’t get the transformation that you do in deciduous forests.

 

In the south west corner of Western Australia, in the Blackwood Valley lots of settlers planted deciduous trees and they thrived in the cooler damper conditions. Situated in the valley is the small town of Balingup and it has developed a healthy tourism industry based around those trees and that is how we found ourselves in Balingup last week. Just walking along the main street we were treated to a riot of autumnal colour that we had literally not seen for decades. Oak trees and plane trees were in proliferation and it was such a thrill to see them. We took ourselves out to see the Golden Valley Tree Park which is just 1.5Km outside Balingup. The park is a huge arboretum based around the old Golden Valley Homestead and within the sixty hectares there are over 3000 trees made up of some 500 different species. Twenty five hectares is devoted to Australian trees and the remainder to the World Collection. We walked the Oak Grove Walk were there were forty different species of oak tree which was pretty mind boggling.

 

 

 

It was great fun just soaking up all that colour. Funnily enough although I had my photo pack with digital and film cameras the camera that I used to record it all was my iPhone. It was just so convenient.