National Wattle Day

1st September is Wattle Day in Australia - and today is the centenary of Wattle Day. The first Wattle Day celebrations took place in NSW, Victoria and South Australia on 1st September 1910.

The Australian countryside is currently splashed with gold as Acacia shrubs and trees burst into bloom; so too are suburban gardens. It really is a delight to drive the back roads and appreciate the glorious colour the wattle is giving to the bushland.

A couple of weeks ago, Grahame and I took our 9-year-old granddaughter for a bush walk to give her a hands on approach to a school environmental project she was working on. She hadn't had a close-up look at wattle, so was interested to find that not all wattle flowers are round. She also wasn't aware that wattle was Australia's national floral emblem - we combined education with fun.

Indigenous Australians used to value wattle plants as a source of food, medicine, and wood for the fashioning of implements and weapons.

In 1988 the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha) was made Australia's official floral emblem, and in 1992 the Commonwealth Government formally designated 1st September as National Wattle Day. It's also largely the source of our green and gold colours.

The celebratory day was chosen by our earlier generations to be an occasion "primarily to inspire and stimulate an Australian national sentiment". It was felt this could be accomplished by embracing such sentiment in a native flower, and uniting as a people on the day to do it honour.

The Wattle had been selected as the most suitable of our native flora because of its accessibility, occurring throughout the length and breadth of our continent.

There are at least 7 to 800 different species of wattle found all over Australia from the outback to the tropics - a very diverse plant. A resilient species, wattle is amongst the first plants to appear after being burnt to the ground in bushfires.

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Interestingly, Acacia flowers don’t produce any nectar, though the gland(s) found along the edge of leaf stems may sometimes exude ‘nectar’ in some species at some times of the year or under certain conditions, and they are often found near the base of the phyllode next to where the flowers appear. Ants and sometimes other animals use this as a food source. Bees still visit the flowers to gather pollen and Acacias seem mostly insect pollinated.

Disturbed land such as along roadsides tend to have many Acacias as common species, as well as logged forests, where Acacias are generally one of the first species to reappear. Others have obviously lost a lot of their habitat and their distribution may have shrunk.

Besides the colour and 'fluffiness' of wattle flowers, the wide range of shape and colour of foliage is a real bonus. There are many spiky species, and when I was exploring the flora of Western Australia on a camping trip a few years ago, I was astounded by the beauty of so many prickly Acacias.

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The flower heads are actually lots of little flowers bunched together. Some flower heads are arranged in racemes. . . . .

. . . . .some are arranged in fluffy rods. . . . .

. . . . .and others are singular flower heads on short stalks

The bush is alive with the vibrant yellows of wattle at the moment, attracting masses of insects, which in turn attract birds. I've been fortunate to enjoy landscapes featuring flowering wattle over the past several weeks from the coast to the semi-arid plains, and it's been an absolute joy.