You might not build a scene around it, but when you need an oddball character for a garden role, try a banksia. Among Australian plants at home in California, they are one of the strangest, with ...

TAMMY: It’s the swollen, woody part of some plants that forms at soil level. It looks like part of the roots but it’s a stem that grows above ground. They’re important adaptations of some plants, used ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Why are banksia flowers so big? I've long admired those huge cones, run my hands over their almost-plastic perfection, marvelled at ...

In the early 20th century, May Gibbs gave banksias a bad rap — the Big Bad Banksia Men in her Gumnut stories have terrified generations of Australian children. A decade later, Margaret Preston focused ...

The elegant banksia flowers grow profusely around Ravens­thorpe, in the southwest of Western Australia. Now they have been immortalised in eye-catching flower portraits, as part of a project run over ...