Presenting the shade-loving white lady

As I bed down my next book, to follow Three Worlds Oak*, I thought I'd post a few flower pictures with my understanding of why they look like they do. That understanding will, as usual, be based on what I hear, read and extrapolate.

The book, to be published by CSIRO Publishing, will be called The Flower Unfurled. I can't give away much at this stage, but the central idea is to look into the 'what', 'why' and 'how' of a flower. For example, does the picture above show a single flower or a collection of flowers, and how do the parts of the flower/flowerhead operate to attract pollinators? And why is it white?

The answers might seem fairly obvious in the case of  Telopea 'Shady White Lady', illustrated here**. Oh, and the cultivar name 'Shady Lady', applied to red and white flowered hybrids, refers to the plant's tolerance of some shade rather than any allusion to disreputable character. 

Most people would know that the waratah bloom is a collection of flowers (although in my book, I argue that some collections of flowers behave more like a single flower and should be given honorary single flower status - looking at you, Amorphophallus titanum, aka titan arum!), in this case about 100 clustered within a few whorls of green-white, cup-shaped bracts.

As to why the flowers are white, this is an unusual form of a common cross between NSW waratah, Telopea speciosissima, and Gippsland waratah, Telopea oreades. A freak occurrence in someone's garden, then selected and propagated in cultivation. So, the colour white is not really an adaptation to attracting pollinators (although it clearly does attract human propagators). It is simply the absence of the usual red colour, which is attractive to birds (and more on that in my forthcoming book...) and apparently marsupials such as possums. All of which are also attracted by the copious sweet nectar.

The shape of the individual flowers is more peculiar and it's not immediately obvious what's going on. They don't have a ring of papery petals with yellow-tipped stamens poking out the top, as you find in many flowers. Instead, they have four floral parts which you might call petals (botanists call them tepals, a cross between petals and the usually green next layer out, the sepals) fused together in bud and curved to one side and swollen at the tip.

Inside that swollen tip are four anthers (the pollen bearing bits) on stalks fused to the petals. There is also a thing called a 'pollen presenter', a swelling of the stalk supporting the receptive female part of the flower. 

As each flower opens - as you can see here - the style pushes through the swollen tip of the petals, exposing the receptive tip to pollen from other flowers deposited by passing birds and possums. The pollen of the flower is released in the bud, so it too is ready and waiting on the tip of this 'pollen presenter'.

For this post, it's enough to know that the flowers work as a collective to attract pollinators and that the structure of each individual flower supports the transfer of pollen from one plant to another. Oh, and although white is probably not a helpful colour to attract its favourite pollinators, it does well enough, as this next picture with a red wattle bird shows.

* Now out in London but not due in Australia until December 2026.

** We were lucky enough to be bequeathed a very large potted specimen of this cultivar and have been enjoying its blooms in Bowral over the last few weeks.