What's Flowering in the Coastal Forest Right Now: September Walk
- Isis
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
I love walking through this majestic coastal forest. It is a place I have begun to know well and more than know, to feel the communication within it. The plants are buzzing, The flowering season has begun with a variety of orchids still to rise and shine from their slumber. The native bees are shifting our of hibernation; the Teddy Bear bees, the Blue Banded bees will soon come out to meet and greet the blooms once again. The Sweat bees already out and about, and the Lasioglossum, the small metallic bees working the low flowering layer quietly and precisely. This forest is where I share and live, a space where the elders of the forest still thrive.
I went out this week with a camera and no particular agenda, just to move slowly tbhrough it and see what was there. What I found stopped me several times, crouching in the leaf litter, trying not too speak too loudly in excitement of what the forest shared.
This is what September looks like in a healthy coastal forest in NSW.
Caladenia - The Orchid you almost walk past
Caladenia orchids are among the most exquisite and most easily overlooked plants in the Australain bush. They emerge once a year, flower for a matter of weeks, and then vanish entirely back into the soil as a single underground tuber. No leaves, No trace. Just a memory.
The ones I found this week are almost certainly Caladenia carnea, the Pink Fingers orchid, or Possibly Caladenia alata, the Winged Spider Orchid. In the field, the two can be genuinely difficult to separate. The more deeply pink specimens with the broader petals lean toward carnea; the paler, more spidery forms with narrower segments suggest alata. But honestly? The forest doesn'rt care what name we give it. It just flowers.
That's worth sitting with for a moment.
The flower itself has five narrow petals and sepals radiating from a centre column that holds the reproductive structures with extraordinary precision. The labellium, the modified petal at the front, is fringed with fine calli, tiny club-shaped structures that mimic the features of an insect. The orchid is, in a very literal sense, lying to its pollinators. It offers nothing, no nectar, no reward, but its mimicry is specific enough that native thynnid wasps arrive anyway, attempting to mate with the flower and carrying pollen from plant to plant in the process.
It is one of the most intricate deceptions in the plant kingdom, playing out right now in the leaf litter of the NSW coast.
Threading through the sedge on stems so fine they seem to float, Tetratheca juncea is a plant that rewards patience. You notice it at first as a flash of pink-purple at knee height, then realise there are dozens of them, moving gently in the coastal breeze.
The common name 'Black-eyed Susan' is shared with several unrelated species, a reminder that common names are a convenience, not a truth. The genus Tetratheca belongs to the family Elaecarpaceae and is endemic to Australia, found nowehere else on earth.
If you have encountered Mirbelia rubiifolia before, you probably remember the leaves more than the flowers. They are tough, holly-like, with sharp margins, rubiifolia refers to their resemblance to the leaves of Rubia, the madder plant. The contrast between that hard architecture and the soft intensity of the magenta pea flowers is part of what makes this plant so striking.
It grows in dry sclerophyll and heath communities along the coast and ranges, favouring sany or rocky soils with good drainage. It is not showy in the way of a Grevillea. It asks you to look more carefully.
Comesperma - Love Creeper
The purple candles of Comesperma are a signature of coastal Heathland in Spring and Summer. The flowers are small individually but carried in dense terminal racemes that make a strong impression in the landscape, especially when you find them rising alongside the yellow of Podolobium in the same frame, as I did on this walk.
The genus name means 'Hair Seed' the seeds carry a fine appendage that aids dispersal. The common name "Love Creeper" comes from the twining habit of some species. There is something right about that name, in a forest that clearly holds everything together through relationship.
Drosera - Sundew
Finding sundew in a coastal forest is a sign. It means the soil is poort in nutrients, seasonally wet, and largely undisturbed. Drosera species are carnivorous precisely because they evolved in conditions where nitrogen is almost unavailable from the soil, so they take it from the air, in the form of insect caught on their glistening red tentacles.
Each tentacle is tipped with a mucilaginous droplet that catches the ligth like a jewel and catches insects like a trap. The leaf responds to touch, slowly folding around its prey. It is a slow-motion drama playing out at ground level, in places most people never stop to look.
The presence of sundew on this walk, tucked into the sun dapple lit forest floor between the orchids, felt like a sign that this patch of coast is still doing what it has always done.
Why this matters
None of these plants exist in isolation. The Caladenia needs it fungi, the Tetratheca needs its native bee. The Drosera marks the health of the soil beneath everything else they are a network, friends, not a collection, When we talk about native plants at Talulah, this is what we mean. Not decoration, not trend, something older and more specific than that a web of relationships that took thousands of years to calibrate, still flowering in the coastal forests of NSW in September, if you know where to look.
We honour you also
As I was about to leave the forest, I turned and gazed back at it. And I said the words, out loud, to the trees, to the orchids still rising from the soil, to the bees, to the whole living network of it, I honour you.
I took in all that I could see as I said those words. And as I went to walk away, I heard it back: We honour you also..
The forest communicating, a mutual love and respect, offered and returned.
I feel that is important to say, because it names something that is at the centre of everything Talulah is. Not the ownership of plants, not the curation of nature, but the recognition. The seeing, the understanding that we are not separate from these ecosystems, that they see us as clearly as we see them, and that the relationship goes both ways.
The Caladenia flowers for three weeks. The sundew glitters within the dappled light of day, the bees vibrate at exactly the right frequency, the forest holds all of it, and it is still doing so.
Honour it when you can.
All photographs taken in Coastal NSW Heathland and Dry Sclerophyll Forest, September 2026. Species indentification is made in good faith; Caladenia identification in the field can be genuinely uncertain and expert verification is always recommended. Talulah grows and sells native plants within NSW. Shop here.
Comments