Australia Day Honours 2024: A lifetime of love for nature and art leads to OAM for Denmark’s Margaret Pieroni

A keen drawer and painter “since I was tiny”, Margaret Pieroni’s love for nature and wildflowers was passed onto her at a young age.

She would go on to have a career as a renowned botanical artist with works featured in countless magazines, books, journals, galleries and even a coin, something that may seem somewhat inevitable in hindsight.

But it took a life-changing cancer diagnosis 55 years ago to set Mrs Pieroni on a path that has led to her inclusion on this year’s Australia Day honours list as the recipient of a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to botanical art.

After finishing high school, Mrs Pieroni completed a three-year course at East Sydney Technical College and then went on to work in advertising as an artist for two decades.

“Then in 1969 I was diagnosed with acute leukaemia which led to three years of chemotherapy,” she said.

“After they finished that, Mum said ‘why don’t we go to Western Australia to see the wildflowers?’.”

I don’t want my works to be the only memory of some of these species. I want them to be there to help people find and identify them.

It was a bucket-list item for Mrs Pieroni who had heard of WA’s wildflowers from her mother whose father had visited the State during a trip across from NSW.

In 1973, she made the trip across the Nullarbor towing a caravan with her parents.

“When I got back home, my husband asked me if I liked WA and Perth and I said ‘yes’,” she said.

“Then he came over and had a look around, then came back and said ‘I’ve got us a house in Perth’.”

An initial enquiry to the WA Herbarium to see if they had any work for a botanical illustrator did not prove fruitful, but she was noticed shortly after joining the Wildflower Society of WA.

“I started doing illustrations for them and they got noticed by the botanists and the herbarium,” Mrs Pieroni said.

“I ended up doing quite a lot of work for the botanists for their papers and books.”

A 1991 exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA entitled Wildflowers in Art, which included a painting by Mrs Pieroni, led to the formation of the Botanical Artist Group of WA.

The group produced a book called Brush with Gondwanda in 2008.

Mrs Pieroni moved down to Denmark after having her “dream house” built on a block of bushland in 2005.

“I had been thinking about coming south because I couldn’t stand the heat and humidity in Perth,” she said.

“The block had two dryandra species on it and so I bought the block and built my rammed earth dream house.”

Dryandras have, and continue to be, a favourite of Mrs Pieroni.

“I got interested in them because my Mum and Dad joined the local garden club on the NSW south coast, then mum started doing flower arranging, particularly dried arrangements,” she said.

“So I was sending her things like dried paper daisies, and then I started growing a few dryandras in my Attadale garden which I would send over to her for dried arrangements.

“She did very well with them and won all the prizes.”

So I was sending her things like dried paper daisies, and then I started growing a few dryandras in my Attadale garden which I would send over to her for dried arrangements. She did very well with them and won all the prizes.

She then joined the Dryandra Study Group as part of the Australian Native Plants Society and eventually became its leader.

“I was growing more and more dryandras, and going out to find them,” she said.

“Only about half of them had been named so we were finding new ones all the time and rediscovering ones they had specimens of at the herbarium without knowing where they had come from.”

Eventually, all that knowledge led to her publishing a book with Tony Cavanagh dedicated to them in 2006, simply titled The Dryandras.

Back pain and faltering eyesight stopped Mrs Pieroni from painting and drawing flowers after a bad spell in 2020.

She had promised herself that she wanted to stop working if her next piece would not meet the standard of the one she had done before it.

At the age of 87, which “she wasn’t supposed to reach” when diagnosed with leukaemia, she is still finding different species of native plants even on her own block of land.

Last year, she found the 20th different orchid on the block but said many others would not come back.

She hopes her work will help the wider community realise how special native plants and wildflowers are, and that they do not just grow as a field of colour at certain times of year.

“I don’t want my works to be the only memory of some of these species,” Mrs Pieroni said.

“I want them to be there to help people find and identify them.”