wildflowers

My Aunt, Vi Taylor, spent much of her childhood in the Eastern Goldfields, where she developed a great love for Western Australian wildflowers. As an adult, she depicted them in paint and stitch on a veriety of surfaces.

This jarrah fire screen was painted as a wedding gift for my parents.

Here is a detail.

Vi also embroidered table linen.

I inherited this tablecloth

along with the notebook my aunt took out into the bush with her to record the plants.


Costume Curator Jo Pearson's interest in my aunt's work led to a joint display of Vi's wildflowers alongside items from the Historical Society collection. Jo brought out a wonderful nineteenth century dress thought to have been made locally in Guilford for Miss Ethel Marion Gull or perhaps even made some years earlier for her mother Annie. This delicate dress is thought to be possibly Western Australia's earliest garment featuring local embroidered flora.





Here is a close detail of the embroidery, stitched on the finest of cotton cloth.


Jo also put on display part of a collection of pressed wildflowers gathered and mounted by Alfred Hillman in 1832, when the colony still was very young.


This flower, seemingly an orchid of some sort, has long since fallen away from its mount, but its memory has been captured in surface of the paper.


This spider orchid was collected and pressed my my aunt Vi over a century later, around sixty years ago.