Lyrebird Dell and Pool of Siloam Walking Track, Blue Mountains National Park, AU

Waratah (Telopea Speciosissima) Flowers
Red and green together always make me think of Christmas. Of course, in Australia, Christmas is in the middle of summer. Waratahs are a spring flower, and the magnificent flowers we came across on our walk in the Blue Mountains National Park near Leura early October made me think of the holiday season ahead.

Pool of Siloam Track
From the Gordon Falls Reserve in Leura, it is a short and well-marked walk down to the Pool of Siloam.

Seed Pods
The Australian bush is full of subtle colours and rough textures.

Banksia Serrata

Leaf in the Dark
As the track continues down to the base of this cliff, it gets darker, and the plant-life changes.

Pool of Siloam
Land features in Blue Mountains often have names with biblical references (e.g.: The Temple of Baal Cave, Jenolan).

Under the Falls
This lovely, shaded pool gets its name from Birkhat Hashiloah (Pool of Siloam) in the City of David, where Jesus sent a man to heal his blindness.

Pool of Siloam
Stepping stones lead through the ferny glen, across the trickling Gordon Creek, …

Path out of the Pool of Siloam
… and up the other side.

Gorse Bitter Pea (Daviesia Ulicifolia)
The vegetation changes again, as we rise up out of the glen.

Broad-Leaf Wedge Pea (Gompholobium Latifolium)
Many of the shrubs and trees we pass are endemic to eastern Australia. This is one of the reasons the Greater Blue Mountains Area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage area of Outstanding Universal Value in 2000: it provides us a “significant representation of Australia’s biodiversity with ten percent of the vascular flora as well as significant numbers of rare or threatened species”.

Blue Mountains Ash (Eucalyptus Oreades)
Reaching up to 40m tall, the beautiful straight trunks of the Blue Mountains ash rise up to the sky around us.

Down to Gordon Creek
We climb back down towards the creek, under overhangs of weathered sandstone.

Lyrebird Dell
We cross the creek again at Lyrebird Dell – hoping (and failing) to see one of these long-tailed Australian birds as we pass.

Wild Lilies
There is plenty of interesting flora in the damp shadows.

Edges of the National Park
Back up towards street level, we are once again among the eucalypts: this one with a fabulously gnarly trunk.

Grevillea Aspleniifolia
There are about 360 species of evergreen flowering plants in the grevillea genus – most with unusual-looking, bird-attracting flowers.

Banksia
Named for botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743- 1820 ), banksia is another genus of plants unique to Australia, with around 170 species.

Waratah Flower
The waratahs are magnificent! I’ve not seen them often in the wild, and it turns out that their own unique beauty almost rendered them extinct. According to the Blue Mountains Whistler: “When city people come to the Mountains for a holiday,” the Sunday Times observed in 1925, “they love to go looking for waratahs. Children sell bunches of the flower to people in trains and cars, and receive a good price for them.” The flowers were nearly wiped out.

Into the Woods
We walked back through the woods full of birdsong, to return to our car.