Sturt’s Desert Pea Wildflower Australian Botanical Notebook

Most flowers are absolute cowards. Think about the standard suburban garden. The petunias, the pansies, the delicate little English roses that immediately surrender to black spot fungus the moment the humidity shifts by three percent. They require a human standing over them with a watering can, a bottle of chemical fertiliser, and a gentle, soothing voice. They are the botanical equivalent of a lapdog. Then you have Clianthus formosus. Sturt’s Desert Pea. Though, if you want to get technical—and I always do, because it irritates people who prefer things simple—the taxonomists have since dragged it into the genus Swainsona. So it’s Swainsona formosa now. Taxonomists spend their lives in dimly lit herbariums shuffling Latin names around like a tedious game of botanical three-card monte. But I digress. Just look at the cover of this notebook. That is not a flower that asks for your permission. It looks like a warning. It looks like a flock of blood-red alien birds diving at the dirt. And staring out from the centre of those vivid crimson petals is the "boss"—that bulbous, glossy, obsidian-black dome that looks exactly like the compound eye of a massive, predatory insect. William Dampier, the English pirate turned explorer, stumbled onto the West Australian coast in 1699, presumably sweating through his woollen breeches and swatting away flies, and collected the first specimen of this thing. Years later, Charles Sturt dragged his doomed expedition through the dead centre of the continent. Sturt was half-blind, his men were rotting from scurvy, the heat was enough to melt lead, and there, creeping across the cracked red plains, were sprawling carpets of these violently red flowers. That’s the environment this plant chooses. The most hostile, sun-baked, godforsaken gravel pits in the Australian outback. It survives because it refuses to play by the rules. The seeds of the Desert Pea are wrapped in a coat so hard it might as well be kevlar. You can leave them in the baking desert dirt for decades. They do nothing. They just wait. They won't germinate until they are physically assaulted by the environment—usually abraded by flash-flood sands or literally boiled by the blistering summer topsoil. When the freak desert rains finally arrive, they don’t just sprout. They explode. They throw down a massive taproot into the sand, grow at a terrifying speed, flower aggressively, drop their seeds, and die. If you try to grow one in a nice, expensive terracotta pot on your patio, it will hate you. If you so much as look at its taproot while transplanting it, the plant will drop dead out of pure, unadulterated spite. It despises domestication. Which brings us to the notebook. There are plenty of notebooks out there with soft, pastel watercolor hydrangeas on the front. Notebooks for writing polite grocery lists. Notebooks for drafting passive-aggressive emails to the homeowners association. This isn't one of them. The Sturt's Desert Pea belongs on a journal meant for field notes. For feral, uncultivated ideas. The black spiral binding of the book mirrors the black boss of the flower, a happy accident of design holding together eighty pages of blank paper. Blank paper is intimidating to humans. We stare at it, terrified of making a mistake. We crave perfection, so we write nothing. The Pea wouldn't hesitate. It thrives in empty, desolate spaces. Maybe you use this to sketch out a business plan that’s going to completely upend your life. Maybe you use it to write a novel that is far too dark for mainstream publishers. Or maybe you just use it to keep track of the birds at your local wetlands, recording the frantic, bloody reality of the food chain while everyone else is busy looking at their phones. It doesn't matter. The paper handles ink beautifully, unlike the Desert Pea itself, which is covered in fine, silky hairs designed to deflect the lethal UV radiation of the outback sun. We think we are the dominant species on this planet. We build cities and split the atom, but if the air conditioning breaks down, we immediately start crying. We are fragile. The flora of the Australian arid zone isn't. Carrying this around is a quiet way of aligning yourself with the things that survive the drought. The things that wait in the dirt for years, entirely forgotten, until the exact right moment to tear open the soil and show everyone exactly what they are.