Greetings fellow Foxies,
Have you ever noticed grainy looking protuberances on the trunks of small rock sheoak trees? They belong to the caterpillar of a Cryptophasa species wood moth. They are also called hermit moths and Cryptophasa means ‘eating in private’ (scientists enjoy using cryptic language).
The caterpillar lives alone in a purely residential burrow in a tree branch that has a covering of silk, frass (a polite word for poo) and wood borings. At night it drags live needles into its burrow attaching them with silk to the entrance and munches away in safety. They pupate in the burrow and then emerge to mate.
The caterpillar of his particular species (?) is very attractive. I wonder what the moth looks like.
They don’t have much effect on the tree

Greetings fellow Foxies, 
Astrolomas and leucopogons have are some of the earliest plants to flower in the growing season.
Astrolomas are low shrubs or ground covers with long tubular flowers that produce fleshy berries called drupes. I used to think that the flowers were pulled out by animals but discovered that developing drupes gradually push out the flowers as they develop. The five species in Foxes lair are shown below

Astrolomas are bush tucker plants. Recently I met a Noongar family that showed me how to find the berries amongst the Kick Bush (Astroloma acervatum) prickly leaves. The name comes from early settlers kicking the prostrate bushes over to see if ripe berries were underneath. Ripe berries are pale with sweet slightly gluey flesh. The green  berry below is not quite ripe but still slightly sweet. Bobtail skinks love them! Astroloma pallidum is a very similar plant with more erect growth.

There are 3 Leucopogons in Foxes Lair, each with tiny short tubular flowers with feathery ends. Leucopogon fimbriatus flowers from July to September on the flats near the claypit. Leucopogon conostephoides on gravelly soils is easy to miss because the flowers are so tiny. Leucopogon propinquis is a lovely green low shrub that grows on deep sandy granitic soils near the Granite Walk.

Greetings fellow Foxies, 
The arboretum is a great place to see how diverse eucalypts can be, with one feature being whether/how they shed their bark each summer.
Eucalyptus leptopoda; Merredin mallee (formerly Tammin mallee, pegs 472 to 475) is a lovely plant that is common on gravel and sandplain soils in the Eastern Wheatbelt. There they have grey/white smooth bark with darker strips of old bark. Today I noticed long shreds of shed bark up to 3 metres long hanging down from upper branches of plants in the arboretum, with light copper new bark that will gradually turn grey white.

Mallees are adapted to cope with regular fires by regenerating from a large lignotuber root, but the arboretum specimens have shaggy bark stem bases and long spindly stems that are beginning to snap.

For more information on eucalypts you can’t go past the brilliant book "Eucalypts of Western Australia’s wheatbelt" by Malcolm French.