Murnong Yam Daisy

The murnong (Microseris walteri) is the yellow-flowered yam daisy of southeastern Australia, a staple Indigenous food plant whose tubers were dug for millennia before colonisation suppressed the practice. Imazu's etching foregrounds the plant as botanical portrait: the dandelion-like rosette of toothed basal leaves and the slender stems supporting nodding buds and open ray florets are described in sharp bitten line, while the surrounding ground is rendered in graduated aquatint that suggests soil, shadow, and the network of edible roots beneath. The Birds & Flowers tag locates the work in the long printed tradition of plant-and-creature imagery — kacho-e in the Japanese register Imazu draws on — but the subject is firmly Australian. Within her wider practice the print is part of an ongoing attention to small native plants framed not as wilderness but as the close, overlooked neighbours of suburban gardens, paddocks, and roadside verges.