​Ericaceae, also called the Heath Family is common on acidic sandy and gravelly (particularly kwongan) soils. Flowers are often small, but exquisitely shaped.
Common features include.

• Prostrate or low shrubs, usually having short tough leaves with parallel leaf veins and a sharp tip.
• Flowers have free sepals surrounding petals, which are fused into a short or long tube ending in petal lobes that may be shorter or longer than the tube.
• Usually white or red/orange flowers with nectar. but may or may not have an aroma.
• Flowers often have tiny hairs or scales on upper petal surfaces on the lobes and/or inside the tube. Incidentally, these hinder non-pollinating insects such as ants from stealing nectar.
• Fruit are berries (drupes) or small capsules, which are eaten by animals. Emus are listed as major seed dispersers.
• Many of them flower early in the year from March onwards.

​Recently there has been an amalgamation of species based on shared genes from DNA analysis. The two largest genera, Astroloma and Leucopogon have been absorbed into Styphelia. These in turn belonged to mostly Western Australian family named Epacridaceae, which has been amalgamated into the formerly mostly eastern states plant family Ericace.
I can see the logic behind genetic grouping, and have a high regard for our Eastern States neighbours (despite them being a trifle strange).
However, it is rather sad for people like me with an flawed memory and even less patience to work my way through a tortuous key to identify plants with shared characteristics.

Historically, classification was based totally on shared plant features. At genus level, flower characteristics have been shaped by evolution to attract particular pollinators.
Here are a few examples.

• Colour. Insect vision is sensitive to ultraviolet and white light, but poor at the red end of the spectrum. Conversely, red stands out for birds and large animals, which are major pollinators)
• Sexual deception in orchids.
• Plants like Hibbertias and tomatoes lack nectar, but have dry loose pollen which attracts bees that use buzz pollination.
•  Plants with nectar and very long petal tubes selectively attract moths and birds. Those with short or no tube are generalists which can be pollinated by many animals including flies.
• Mammal specific flowers are often large, hidden, dull-coloured, and strongly scented with lots of nectar.

In older papers I noticed that the old genera often had different pollinators due to flower shape and colour. To me this is much more interesting than a huge genetic genus
​.
At risk of being labelled a dinosaur, I list local Ericaceae genera below using the old classification so I can easily distinguish plant groups  having shared characteristics in the bush. Some other amateurs may find it useful.​

Genus Lysinema (unchanged)
Flowers of the most common species called Curry Bush have a curry powder smell, which attracts pollinating moths. Flowers have several distinctive brown bracts, which cover most of the white flower tube. Formerly classified as Lysinema ciliatum, it has been renamed Lysinema pentapetalum. The species are very similar, but rarely interbreed. Lysinema ciliatum flowers have a sweet smell, less flowers per group, lighter coloured bracts and are mainly further south. Further information.

​Genus Andersonia (unchanged)
There is only species, Andersonia caerula - Foxtails and a few priority 2 species in Narrogin district. The stunning Foxtail flower has long pink sepals designed to attract birds and delicate pale blue petal tubes with a narrow entrance, which is packed with stamens and the pistil to keep unwanted insects out. Pollinators need a firm beak or tongue to get through to the nectar. Honeyeaters are listed as major pollinators, but bees were active when I visited them at Ylliminning Nature Reserve.

Ex-genus Astroloma (now Styphelia)
This hardy group has sepals shorter than, and which clasp a pollen tube with short hairy-interior lobes. I was surprised to learn that all local species are pollinated by Western Spinebills and honeyeaters. On reflection, it made sense because most flowers are red-orange and have tight narrow petal-tube entrances. All species have fleshy berries, which are dispersed by birds and bobtail skinks. Emus were particularly common eaters of flowers and berries. Alas no longer in our widely dispersed reserves. As many Astrolomas are fire-sensitive, a lack of emus to disperse seed could threaten their long term survival. They are generally very tough and long-lived, and have evolved to live in dry places.
​There are five species in Foxes Lair.

​Ex-genus Leucopogon (now Styphelia)
There are many species in Narrogin district reserves, which have similar looking flowers - small whitish flowers with long petal-tube lobes, usually with an abundance of fluffy hairs on upper side of the lobes. They are exquisite close-up. The short open petal tube provides nectar access for a range of flying insects (flies wasps butterflies and moths, gnats, birds), but bees are the main pollinators.
​There are three species in Foxes Lair.
References
Keighery 1996 Phytogeography, Biology and Conservation of Western Australian Epacridaceae
​De Gruyter Eight Pollination Syndromes​

​Greetings fellow foxies,

Every year, tourists flock north to see mass everlasting displays in the Northern Wheatbelt and pastoral areas.
Narrogin district has many of these wildflowers, which belong to the Asteraceae (daisy) family, also known as Compositae.  Patches of colourful spring everlastings occur in most years, particularly in wandoo-sheoak woodland, and in wet areas.

​​Asteraceae includes spring flowering annuals, which flower in groups and perennials which often occur as scattered plants.
Flowers in this family share the following characteristics:
​
Deceptive flowers occur as a group on a single stem, which looks like a single large flower.
​Think of a sunflower head, which comprises a cup-shaped calyx of scale-like leaves (bracts) enclosing numerous tiny flowers. Flower petals are fused into a tube (corolla) with tiny triangular ends. These are called disk flowers. Often the outer row of flowers has a single large petal-like lobe, which extends out so the flowering head resembles a single flower. These are called rim flowers.
​
Each tiny flower has numerous hairs surrounding the corolla. which enable the dry seeds to blow away easily. 

I have created three categories to illustrate the variation in design of the flowering head.
​
1. Rim flower species in the Narrogin district. There are also several weed species, which are not shown.

The following two groups lack rim flowers in the flowering head.
2. Disk flowers only forming a button-shaped head. 

Stamens are not visible in Antheraceae flowers, because they use secondary pollen presentation.
​
​Stamens remain in the base of each flower with the pollen bearing anthers facing the style in the centre. As the plant develops, the style pushes up and collects pollen, which sticks on hairs below the end (stigma). Pollen remains viable on the style for up to a week, after which it dies. Stigma lobes at the end of the style then open out to expose the active female surface to be fertilised by pollen from other flowers

Individual flowers produce a drop of nectar at their base. They don't all mature at once, but start on the outside and mature inwards often in a spiral fashion. This induces insects to repeatedly visit the flowering head and visit each flower as it changes from pollen presentation to the pollen receiving phase.

• ​Most acacia flowers lack nectar and rely on scent and a dazzling yellow colour to attract pollinators. I think that most pollination is done by pollen-collecting bees. Birds, flies (particularly hover flies), and pollen-eating wasps may also be involved. The taxonomy literature is so confusing, I couldn't work out which subgenus a species belongs to, or their pollinators.
• Most acacias secrete nectar from special glands on stems and phyllodes (flattened leaf-like stems) to attract ants, which keep parasites away.
• Despite producing thousands of flowers, relatively few produce their pea-like pods. I suspect this may be because the seed is very long lasting and requires fire to germinate. Some seeds have a fleshy part (aril) to attract ants, which take the seed down their burrows away from predators.
• Noongars collected acacia seeds as bush tucker. A wacky friend of mine was going to make a fortune selling acacia flour noodles - until weevils crawled out of the seeds :) .

​

Further reading
A Simple Botany of Wattles
Pollination Ecology of Acacias
Don't blamewattles for hay fever

Greetings fellow foxies,
About 33 years ago I planted a Eucalyptus caesia subspecies caesia (gungurru) mallee in my front yard, which has grown into a magnificent specimen that produces cascades of beautiful pink flowers. It is great bird attractant, particularly New Holland honeyeaters and western wattle birds, which claim ownership at various times of the year. Lately most flowers (and my wife's roses and geraniums) are lopped by ### twenty eight parrots. Very occasionally red-tailed black and Carnabys cockatoos chew the nuts, but not red capped parrots. Plenty of honeybees.
Eucalyptus caesia is a rare bird-pollinated species that is endemic to 25 granite outcrops in the Central Wheatbelt of Western Australia, but is widely grown in native gardens. Every surviving flower on my caesia develops into a nut even though the nearest other caesia is over 200 metres down the road, and I see the same with single eucalypt species in Foxes Lair. Evidently most eucalypts can self pollinate!

This study of E. caesia pollination at Boyagin Rock revealed some amazing information.

• The large flowers are mainly pollinated by birds, which regularly  transmit pollen up to 120 metres.
• On average there were three genetic groups at each mallee patch, which minimised damaging inbreeding. Insect-pollinated plants would have less diversity
• Clumps often had a group of clone plants which developed into individual plants as the lignotuber (mallee root) expanded then rotted between suckers. The largest  clonal patch comprised 55 stems over an area 8.8 m wide and 11.5 m long. This patch may be thousands of years old and among the oldest known eucalypts. I was impressed by the 80cm diameter root on my 33 year old plant before reading the paper.
• At natural Caesia locations, there hasn't been a surviving seedling for over 50 years. Fire is required to remove competition.
• The paper provides an opportunity to revise your knowledge of statistics and  words like cleistogamy and kurtosis.

I collected flowers at varying stages of development for examination. Pollen develops early in the flower's development, and is actively collected by honeybees as soon as the bud cap is shed, and inward-facing stamens still formed a tube down to the flower base. Soon afterwards bees crawled down into the base where nectar was being produced. Honeyeaters also started feeding as the stamens folded out and fully opened.

​ Bees vigourously wiggled their way across stamens, stuffing pollen into their leg-sacs.The anthers seemed to be sticky and didn't spontaneously shed pollen like most other flowers.

I noticed bees still licking nectar from the flower base in mature flowers while anthers were declining. This indicated that the later maturing stigma on the end of the style was still receptive to pollen. It is a logical way to prevent the flower pollinating itself.
Signs of stigma maturity were subtle, but images show it changes from being hidden in the bud cap,then a fold at the tip (non-receptive), to a moist receptive bulge.

​Honeybees are larger than most native bees, but it was evident that they rarely contacted the stigma due to large flower size. They just stole pollen and nectar while birds, small animals, (large flower wasps?) did the pollination.
Apart from stink bugs, which routinely remove growing points from most seedlings I try to rear in Foxes Lair, few insects bother my street tree. This little fellow is tolerated.