Blooming in Peace
Nowadays the purple donkey is a rare beast. So rare, you need to head to a cemetery near Young, in central NSW, to have your best chance of spying this specimen, nuzzling among the pioneer graves of Messrs Fowler, Freudenstein and Beehive.
Did I mention the purple donkey is a native orchid? A plant ecologist named Dr Suzanne Prober made the discovery in 1991. She and her husband Kevin Theile spent years combing the NSW grasslands looking for native flora, only to stumble on a four-hectare boneyard where purple donkeys, chocolate lilies and creamy candles proliferate.
Where grazing land has blasted many of the original blossoms, Monteagle Cemetery has inadvertently preserved a native Garden of Eden. Prober goes so far as to label the plot as the best intact example of understorey species in Oz.
An active team of volunteers and field scientists are seeking to keep the patch lapsing into homogenous buffalo by regular burning sessions – as the local Aboriginal people had observed. With vigilance and fire, it seems even the everlasting daisy (Chrysocephalum apiculatum) is destined to fulfil its name.
You can find out more about rare plants in the box woodlands of central NSW by visiting http://www.anbg.gov.au/cpbr/cemeteries/cemeteries.html Or stick your nose into a heart-stopping cemetery, 15 kilometres north of Young.