thomas m wilson

I’ve just read this new book from Fremantle Press: Wildflower Country.  It is a large, folio-style book of macro colour photographs of wildflowers from the south-west of Australia.  The Western Australian flowers often reminded me of unearthly, alien-like organisms when seen in these beautifully photographed macro perspectives.  As the author of the text, Stanley Breeden, comments in the book, the study of these flowers combines the emotional impact of the aesthetics of the flowers with the intellectual pleasure of learning about the workings of their ecological identities.  I met and interviewed the authors – Stanely and his wife Kaisa – and you can hear this interview on Understorey, 11.30am 15 September, RTR 92.1FM.  The work is a fitting tribute to what is now acknowledged by ecologists as the area with the greatest wildflower show on earth: my home.  On this upcoming show I’ll also be talking with Dom McFarlane from CSIRO about the future drying up of the south-west because of global climate warming.  I leave it to you, the listener, to draw what connections you may between these different subjects.