Painting & Wandering: A Creative Guide to

Flowers of Lutruwita

Welcome to a journey of petal, pollen, and pigment. This guide pairs your Flowers of lutruwita painting pad with real places and seasonal moments across Tasmania, where native blooms offer nourishment, beauty, medicine, and memory.

This pad is about slow noticing. It invites you to pause and pay attention to the soft strength of things that grow. These are flowers with purpose—carrying stories of Country, harvest, healing, and resilience.

Bring your Flowers of lutruwita pad, your travel brush, a notebook, and time to sit gently with place.

🌸 1. Meet the Flowers in Your Pad

Each flower in this pad has a presence—a colour, a scent, a texture, and a story. Here’s where you might meet them in the wild:

• Scoparia – Found in alpine and subalpine areas. Walk the trails of Cradle Mountain, Mount Field, or Hartz Mountains in late spring to early summer and watch for carpets of white and pink.

• Blandfordia punicea (Tasmanian Christmas Bell) – Red and gold bell-shaped flowers lighting up buttongrass plains near Mount Wellington, Southport, and Lune River during summer.

• Wild Duck Orchid – Elusive and captivating. May appear in heathlands around Douglas-Apsley, Eaglehawk Neck, or Tinderbox Hills if you're lucky, especially in spring.

• Blue Gum Flower – The bloom of Tasmania’s floral emblem. Found in dry forests near Launceston Gorge, Snug Tiers, or Bruny Island, usually in warmer months.

• Banksia – Hardy, golden, fire-adapted. Spot their blooms in Freycinet, Ben Lomond foothills, or along East Coast dry forest tracks.

• Leatherwood – Fragrant and twisted. This rainforest flower blooms in takayna, near Waratah, and throughout the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers area.

• Boronia gunnii – A threatened deep pink wildflower, best seen in the Liffey Valley, Lake St Clair, or north-west wet forests—if you're fortunate.

• Tasmanian Waratah (Telopea truncata / Kiuntah) – A striking red bloom of strength and spirit. Found along Mount Field trails, Lake Pedder high country, and in abundance around Waratah on the west coast in late spring.

🌿 2. Where to Paint Among the Plants

Choose spots where the air is cool, the light shifts through trees, and the flowers quietly bloom. These are places to sit, sketch, and listen.

Floral Painting Stops:

• Cradle Mountain / Pencil Pine Walk – Mosses, pandani, scoparia, and mountain views.

• Mount Field National Park – One of the best multi-flower walks—Christmas bells, waratahs, and leatherwood.

• Snug Falls – Among the eucalypts and blue gum blossoms, with water sounds in the background.

• Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers – Lush rainforest trails with leatherwood and ancient presence.

• The Blowhole to Fossil Bay (Eaglehawk Neck) – Windswept track with orchids, banksia, and rocky textures.

🎨 3. Painting with the Plants

• Let your brush move with care—like running your fingers across a petal.

• Use dry brush techniques for fine lines and detail—imagine you're painting with pollen.

• Don’t worry about botanical accuracy. Let your feelings about the plant shape your colours.

• These flowers have survived fire, snow, drought, and wind—paint their resilience, not just their beauty.

🖤❤️💛 4. The Sacred Stop – Meander Valley

Panninher Country

• Among the cool mists and myrtle trees of Meander Valley, the forest carries both sorrow and strength.
  Here, native flowers bloom in ancient soils, among stories of loss and healing.
  This is a place of mourning, but also of resilience, where old plant knowledge grows quietly in shadow.
  Walk slowly. The land here remembers everything—and still offers beauty.