Floriade, that annual orgy of horticultural kitsch, that vulgar Hawaiian shirt in our city's otherwise elegant wardrobe, is much in the news at the moment. The city's potentates and commoners (the latter especially in their well-reasoned and quite well spelled Letters to this newspaper) are debating where it will gonext year.
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This year's Floriade (which we will take the usual delight in boycotting) will be the last inflicted on Commonwealth Park. Those of us who use the park swear that we can hear and feel it rejoicing at the good news. Beneath our feet the green bosom of the park's lawns heaves with relief. The leaves of the park's trees usually only whisper in the breeze but today one can hear them singing "Oh frabjous day!! Calooh! Callay!"
But wherever Floriade goes (and surely its spiritual home is Queanbeyan), its spring display never will compare, for discerning Canberrans, to the spring display of native wildflowers on Black Mountain.
Opening on Saturday, the not-very-sexily titled exhibition Black Mountain Nature Reserve: A Special Place, will celebrate the place's wondrousness and importance.
Today's pictures of native wildlife, of a Gang-gang cockatoo and of a Kicking Peacock Spider (not a spider that kicks peacocks but a peacock-coloured spider that has a kicking gait), were taken on wildlife-rich Black Mountain. On our most recent ramble on the mountain's bosky flanks a plump, cheerful, slow-moving snake ambled through the flowers past the toes of our hiking boots. This made our day and advertised the place's qualities as a natural habitat.
To digress a little for a moment, it is not Black Mountain's fault that it has a telecommunications tower atop it. However, as we have written elsewhere, that tower will never seem the same again (and most of us do get a glimpse of it every day) for those Canberrans who visit the Canberra Museum and Gallery's controversial exhibition X-Rated.
This CMAG extravaganza (one has to be 18 to be admitted to it) is all about Canberra's famous association with video pornography and brothels. It features an unforgettable poster of yesteryear (it is promoting safe sex) in which the famous tower is rather phallic and is wearing a condom. The image rather tattoos itself on the memory, changing forever one's perception of the tower. Alas, the rather Freudian picture poster for Black Mountain Nature Reserve: A Special Place, gives some blush-making prominence to the tower.
But enough of pornography and back to nature, and we challenged Linda Beveridge the convener of Friends of Black Mountain, to tell us why the mountain needs friends.
As an example, she told us how the friends have formed "weeding working parties" that are systematically searching the mountain for opportunistic plants that have no business being there. Parties are working around and up the mountain in a kind of slow "spiral" that will see them, perhaps over two years of spiralling, examine every nook and cranny of the great monadnock, taking away its weeds.
One of the worst weed species, it emerges, is an alien species of Melaleuca used in decorative plantings along Belconnen Way. Its seeds seek out, with determination and aplomb, any wet spots on the mountain. If it wasn't defied it would spread and spread and transform the bailiwick.
As it is, the mountain's naturalness is worth defending. The survival of such a swathe of natural, native bushland in our city (we can remember Black Mountain being called, by opponents of the building of the awful tower, "the biggest traffic island in the world") seems a kind of miracle.
Beveridge points to how there are 670 known plant species on the mountain, including 60 kinds of orchids. The sheer diversity of plants seems to be related to the mountain's special geology, which embraces some of the oldest rocks in the ACT. They include the honey-coloured Black Mountain Sandstone, from which Australia's Best Church, St.John's in Reid, is substantially made, giving it the look of an edible, gingerbread building.
Wildlife abounds on the mountain and may even include creatures we've yet to find there. There'll be nothing new as big as a bunyip (for the weeders would surely have seen it) but it was only in 2012 and on one of the Friends' organised walks that spider enthusiast Stuart Harris found, with great excitement that Beveridge remembers well from that memorable day, the tiny Kicking Peacock Spider, Maratus calcitrans. Not even he, the spider-literate Harris, had known that the ACT was blessed with Maratus calcitrans.
The exhibition, supported with funding made available by the ACT Government under the ACT Heritage Grants Program, is about the natural and cultural heritage of Black Mountain and its conservation now and into the future. The free exhibition opens on Saturday and continues until July 31 on the lower ground floor of Black Mountain's embarrassing-looking tower.
The glimpse here of one of Black Mountain's Gang-gang cockatoos reminds us of our serial interest over past months in the Canberra Ornithologists Group's Gang-gang Survey. Watch this richly-plumaged space for, in the fullness of time, the results of this probe of our mysterious faunal emblem.
"We have been delighted by the fantastic response from the Canberra and region community to the survey," a COG Gang-gang survey coordinator, Kathy Eyles, tells us.
"We're now busy analysing the 1000s of observations submitted by 100s of observers."
