The south-west of Western Australia is a global biodiversity hotspot primarily for its extraordinarily rich flora. The Stirling Range is the epicentre of that diversity.
It is reported officially that the Stirling Range National Park’s 1,700 species of plant is a total exceeding that for the entire British Isles. A remarkable number of these occur nowhere else.
The National Park is an island in a sea of agriculture, though a rather large island at 1,159 km2, a rather neat rectangle 65 km long by 18 km wide.
The Range runs for much of the length of the Park with many peaks over 600 m and a high point, Bluff Knoll, c. 1,090 m ASL. The peaks attract a lot of moisture compared to the surrounding plains and are often shrouded in mist.
In contrast, on the Park’s drier north side the vegetation is semi-arid, consisting of low mallee scrub and heath which give way to wheat fields beyond the Park.

Tragically, since we visited the Park in October 2019, the eastern third of the Park including the highest peak, were burnt by wildfire
(e.g. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-07/bushfires-cause-stirling-ranges-biodiversity-to-be-devastated/11844516 ).
The vegetation is, generally, fire-tolerant, but there are concerns about the extent and extremity of the fire, that it comes rather too soon after previous extensive fires, and that high-elevation vegetation that normally remains moist and which supports a number of rare, endemic plants, was also burnt.

The following sub-gallery contains a selection of the vast array of wildflowers we saw in the Range.