Six wildflower and spring festivals in WA

Travel & Touring| WA Things to Do

20 August, 2024 By: Myke Bartlett

As Western Australia’s extraordinarily diverse wildflowers begin to spread from north to south, take a weekend, a week or even more to check out the many festivals celebrating spring and some of the colourful flora you’ll find nowhere else on earth.

In WA, we’re blessed with an unusually long wildflower season, beginning around June in the north and winding up around November at the southernmost fringes.

With the southern region of WA one of Australia’s two globally recognised hotspots for biodiversity, a number of spring festivals are about to get underway from Perth to the far south, each highlighting the treasures unique to their region and celebrating the local landscape and culture.

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Starting in Perth and heading south, here are five wildflower and spring festivals to do on a day trip or a longer road trip.

Everlasting Kings Park Festival - 13-29 September 2024

Few cities are gifted with such an impressive expanse of parkland as Perth. King Park’s proximity to the CBD is certainly one of the unique features of this wildflower festival, along with an unrivalled breadth of species, with an estimated 3,000 species of plants endemic to Western Australia on display.

The Everlasting Kings Park Festival is centred around the Western Australian Botanic Garden, one of the most visited and well-regarded botanic gardens in the world. The program includes events a number of events all taking place amongst the 5,860 spring annuals, grown in the Kings Park Nursery.

While the festival itself runs for a fortnight, an army of skilled horticulturalists and volunteers will have been working on getting things ready over the past year, with some of the garden planning and plant seeding happening up to two years in advance.

Visitors can explore ticketed experiences such as behind-the-scenes tours of the Kings Park Nursery and the renowned Plant Development program, as well as a range of free events and activities.

Highlights include the everlastings bed on Lovekin Drive featuring a colourful mix of rhodanthe and schoenia species, the Conservation Garden featuring rare and threatened WA flora, and the famous plant sale beloved by collectors and plant enthusiasts wanting treasures not available from commercial nurseries.

Chittering Spring Fest - 31 August-15 September 2024

The first half of September is a celebration of all things spring in Chittering. What was once only a wildflower festival has become a vivid and wide-ranging welcome to the warmer weather.

Find out where to head for the best displays of endemic wildflowers, enjoy local food, wine and seasonal produce, and discover local arts and crafts, with artists inviting visitors to their studios.

At Westways Wildflower Farm, where wildflowers are preserved for export, you can sample sandalwood nut. The nut itself is said to be an acquired taste, but it’s made far more enjoyable served wrapped in chocolate or as sandalwood brittle.

The area is also great for walking trails, with guided tours taking visitors through some key sites of local history, including some of Moondyne Joe’s hideouts.

Within an hour’s drive of the Perth CBD, Chittering is ideal for day-trippers and is also a gateway to the wildflower country of the Wheatbelt.

Bloom Festival - 21 September-20 October 2024

Although wildflowers are only one part of this festival, there can be no doubt Bloom is the state’s largest and longest celebration of spring.

The month-long program features events from rural and regional townships across eight shires in WA’s south. According to the team responsible, a month is barely long enough to capture all the treats this region has to offer.

Visitors are encouraged to come for a few days at a time, set up camp in a town such as Katanning, and travel out from there to the Stirling Range, Frankland River or the Porongurup Range, taking in a host of events along the way. Choose from art and craft displays, terrarium or flower arranging workshops, Nyungar cultural events, market stalls, live music or wine and dine evenings.

Floral highlights include Bloom in Bremer Bay – a morning of craft, followed by lunch and a guided wildflower walk around town.

Keep an eye out for the colourful Queen of Sheba orchid. One of the rarest flowers on Earth, it’s been enticing international botanists, photographers and wildflower enthusiasts to Bremer Bay for years. The species only flowers for a short period, which (as it happens) overlaps neatly with Bloom Festival.

Esperance Wildflower Festival - 17-21 September 2024

Held at the Esperance Civic Centre, the Esperance Wildflower Festivalis the most south-easterly of its kind, but close enough to Ravensthorpe to attract wildflower hunters and grey nomads alike (the festivals deliberately overlap). It’s also the only festival of its kind to be led by a First Nations community, with the Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation taking over coordination of the show from this year.

The theme for 2024 is ‘Granite: A Treasury of Plants and Culture’, reflecting the nature of the landscape and its cultural corridors. Granite outcrops have been culturally significant to the Wudjari Nyungar people for many thousands of years, acting as landmarks to determine the boundaries between traditional lands.

Cultural discovery will play a large part in this year’s program, with visitors learning about plants with cultural significance for the area’s Traditional Custodians, the Wudjari Nyungar community.

Also on offer are arts encounters, where festivalgoers can participate in community sculpture workshops with visiting Nyungar artist Sharyn Egan and local artist Naomi Stanitzki.

There will also be the usual displays of wildflowers unique to the region and talks about plants and the environment from high profile guest speakers Professor Tim Flannery and Professor Stephen Hopper. Visitors can also take part in guided tours and workshops with local and visiting botanists.

Beyond the organised program, the area features a number of wildflower trails to explore solo, including the Kepwari Walk Trail, where you’ll find the path lined with spider orchids, cowslips, banksias, wattle and kangaroo paws.

Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show & Festival - 9-21 September 2024

As flower shows go, this is the biggest bloom. Surrounded by the wide expanse of the Fitzgerald River National Park, the Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show & Festivalhas a fantastic breadth of native flowers on show. No wonder it’s considered one of the biggest of its kind.

Across its two-week program, 41 pickers will choose from thousands of species, with the park thought to contain around a third of the state’s wildflowers, some still undocumented.

Local specialities include the hakea Victoria (also called the royal hakea), known for having an unusual and spectacular range of colour on the same bush, and the qualup bell pimelea physodes, an iconic plant famed for its large, pendant flowers.

The Ravensthorpe shire is also dubbed the eucalyptus centre of the universe, containing more gum trees than anywhere else on the planet, including a few hundred endemic, rare and threatened species. Perhaps most famous is the eucalyptus sepulcralis, a spectacularly weeping gum tree said by the festival organisers to be “better than any weeping willow.”

It isn’t all about the flowers, of course. As with many wildflower festivals, the Ravensthorpe show (now in its 43rd year) celebrates a wide selection of the area’s attractions. This year’s theme is ‘art in nature’, with the program encouraging visitors to explore, discover and learn. Sessions include workshops making visual and written art inspired by the local flora, as well as excursions to sample native foods.

Albany Wildflower Show - 18-21 September 2024

Albany’s Wildflower Show is on during the Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show and makes a great stop off on the way to or from Ravensthorpe.

Organised by a passionate team of wildflower experts and enthusiasts, the Albany Wildflower Show will feature hundreds of botanically curated wildflowers collected from around Walpole to Bremer Bay and up to Broomehill, including the Stirling Range.

There will also be a special exhibit of local trees to help you identify different species. The show will be held in St John’s Hall, on York Street in Albany.