Esperance botanist Kat Walkerden at work in the mallee. Photo: Kat Walkerden.
Esperance Wildflower Society secretary and botanist Kat Walkerden has made local salt land plants her specialty.
“Lots of plants are unique to these salt lakes and found nowhere else in the world,” she said after a Monday talk for Djilba Esperance Wildflower Show.
Since leaving Murdoch University with a Masters Degree in 2021 she has spent much of her spare time on salt lake country within a few hours’ drive of Esperance, observing and documenting plants.
“You see a whole bunch of stuff you don’t see anywhere else,” she said.
“The transition zones between regular mallee vegetation and the salt lakes can be particularly biodiverse due to the changing soil and the additional disturbance you can get occasionally with flooding.
“If every 20 years you are getting a disturbance regime, that does require a lot of salt tolerant plants as it does shake things up.”
Beside salinity, Walkerden said there was a huge variation in soil acidity in local salt lakes, ranging from 2.3 to more than nine.
She said salt-adapted plants lost their natural advantage if they had to compete with other plants in less saline soils, but could still survive without competition.
“You can definingly have them surviving in your garden without big salt,” Walkerden said.
“Every now and then you might see one single saltlake pant in mallee woodlands, no salinity but it is going OK, for example the Darwinia species.
“The adaptations are energy intensive, so a plant that’s wasting energy on an adaptation that isn’t needed tends to be less successful than another plant.”
Esperance Wildflower Society holds monthly field trips and invites the public to an open day this Sunday, September 28, with enquiries directed to espwildflower@gmail.com .
