Karrgatup Kings Park and it’s wildflower time. I walk around with my nephew and see the flowering of Western Australia—from silky eremophila to spider orchids. But the one that really stops me is the dwarf kangaroo paw from Yonga Mir the Stirling Range region. The ranges are higher up, quartz sandstones and shales—a long way from the sandy dunes of Whadjuk Country on the Swan Coastal Plane. And for some reason I’m struck—the kangaroo paw in this place grows tall and slender, but down there on those higher ridges and harder rocks he’s lower, closer to the ground. And in that moment I get a glimpse of something akin to Goethe’s archetypal plant which he first spied on his trip to Italy, crossing mountains and visiting other gardens with the same plants from his German Weimar, but in those other places appearing differently, given different conditions. And so he articulated what he saw as an archetypal plant—the plant in all plants which could, given the right conditions, take on an infinite number of forms. Here something of that same plant, expressed also in the archetypal kangaroo paw—in front of me, the dwarf.