“Beaut!” Philippa Nikulinsky breaks a long silence and grinds her battered truck to a halt, allowing a tornado of yellow dust to catch up and engulf us. Philippa, a botanical artist, is making her annual pilgrimage to visit “old friends.”

A dozen of them, perfect wreath flowers (1) are strewn along the road as if they had bounced from the back of a florist’s van. Farther on, a startling pink pigface (2) nestles in a stony pinnacle. It is August—late winter—and one of the planet’s most extravagant wildflower show has begun. Over the next three months most of Western Australia’s 12,000 species of wildflowers will burst into bloom.

When Australia and Antarctica separated 50 million years ago, rain forests covered the land. As Australia drifted north and the climate grew more arid, leaching and erosion left patchy soils. Isolation and adaptation to new conditions produced new varieties of plants, such as the more than 95 species of Dryandra (3). To lure pollinators, grass trees send flower spikes skyward (4). For green algae (5, under a non-native grass) adaptation means going dormant until rains revive them.

“No good!” Kalgoorlie artist Mary Mclean scowls as she tastes a blossom (6), hoping to find one sweet with nectar. Aborigines long mad a sweet drink by soaking nectar-laden flowers in water. When explorer Ludwig Leichhardt crossed Australia in the mid-19th century, he relied on food from Aborigine camps. He found bark bowls “full of honey water, from one of which I took a hearty draught, and left a brass button.”

Feasting with her eyes, a member of a Tokyo flower club (7) stalks wildflowers in their natural habitat. Wool growers, hurt by low prices, solicit tourists to pick flowers on their land. Dormant in summer heat that bakes the ground to 140°F, the Borya, or resurrection plant (8), blossoms for a few weeks if Warradagga, the huge granite outcrop to which it clings, has been blessed by winter rain.

Named for Joseph Banks, who collected the first specimens at Botony Bay in 1770 while on the Cook Expedition, the genus Banksia includes plants ranging from low shrubs to 90 foot trees. Ensconced like candles on coastal cliffs, Banksia praemorsa (9) thrives on icy, wet winds tht blast the south shore, yet it readily succumbs to Phytophthora, a fungus that has become epidemic. Several species are now threatened with extinction by the blight.

Banksi menziesii (10) sheds its mane of blossoms to reveal a cone of velvety bracts. Swelling seed follicles later push the bracts apart. As with most of Western Australia’s 61 species of Banksia, the follicles of B. incana (11) may endure for years before fire splits them at the seams and they drop their seeds.

Fire—essential to many Australian wildflowers—reduces competition, opens seedpods, triggers germination, and provides nutrient-rich ash. A blaze set deliberately to provide a firebreak (12) leaves a charred landscape (13). Across it ambles a lizard called a mountain devil, looking like a cross between a hand grenade and a seedpod. Behind this six-inch-long ant eating monster, cones of Banksia, cracked open by heat, have released their seeds.

Rustling in the breeze, papery everlastings (14) adorn the picnic that bush guide Allan Woodward and Philippa, at right, enjoy with visiting friends. In flower arrangements, everlastings live up to their name. A favorite of grazing kangaroos, the fresh blossoms last only a month in the wild. As Philippa says, “When they go, they’re completely gone, and the ground will be just parched until next year.”

“Nobody knows how many there are,” eminent botanist Alex George parries when pressed to number the species represented in the wildflower population. “In Western Australia’s nearly million square miles, new ones are being discovered all the time. Four new species of feather flowers (15) were recognized last season, bringing their total to a neat hundred.”

Native daisies (16) belong to a large, cosmopolitan family and look familiar. Yet many of the 800 known Australian species grow nowhere else in the world.

Some wildflowers grow only in one small area of Western Australia. Exclusive to 25 square miles around the town of Eneabbe, Calytris eneabbensis (17) glistens like an ice palace in the cool morning dew.

With feet like a dinosaur’s, a flightless emu tramples a purple velvet fanflower (18). Wildflowers have long since adapted to drought, fire, and the abuse of kangaroos and emus. Since the early 1800s, however, land clearing for agriculture has stripped extensive bush areas. Even today many farmers consider wildflowers a fire hazard and rarely spare even a patch of native grass trees, unlike a grower who left some in his rapeseed crop (19).

Attitudes are changing. Researchers anticipate finding wildflowers of enormous pharmacological value. Picking—permitted only with a state license—is coming under close scrutiny, and cultivated hybrids are helping meet the growing export demand. Philippa Nikulinsky and other artists and botanists have shown what a treasure Western Australia’s wildflowers are.  So now Philippa’s old friends have a. mob of new ones. — Cary Wolinsky, Wildflowers of Western Australia, National Geographic, January 1995