Limestone spider-orchid. Limestone spider-orchid.
IT'S A pity plants can't read, because the rare and homely Austral pipewort might take comfort in the Book of Ecclesiastes: ''To everything there is a season … A time to be born, and a time to die.''
This fragile and tiny plant comes to life only five times a century, flowers for a few weeks and dies again. For up to 20 years the seeds lie dormant in swamps, awaiting inundation by warm water.
This occurred last year in the summer floods in the Wimmera, where a specimen was discovered near Horsham, in February, by botanist John Eichler. This was the first sighting since 1991, when the drought was taking hold.
Austral pipewort. Austral pipewort.
Mr Eichler alerted David Pitts, a biodiversity officer with the Department of Sustainability and Environment who had spent five years without luck looking for the plant.
Mr Pitts, whose job entails searching out and identifying rare threatened plant species, had the pipewort on his most wanted list for five years.
''It became a bit of a personal quest … it's only been seen by a handful of people in the wild.''
Shiny-nematolepis. Shiny-nematolepis.
Mr Pitts and a party of field naturalists soon after found a second population in a small wetland in the southern Grampians.
''The plants that were photographed are already dead,'' he said.
''They produced thousands of seeds. We may see another flowering this summer … or in a couple of decades.''
Wimmera bottlebrush. Wimmera bottlebrush. Photo: sundaypix@theage.com.au
Government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller discovered the Austral pipewort in 1853. A second specimen was not collected until 1975.
The pipewort is one of several rare species to make a comeback due to the extreme weather conditions of the past two years. The Wimmera bottlebrush, only previously seen in a small creek in the Wimmera, has been found flourishing in a spooky redgum swamp in the southern Grampians.
David Pitts describes an epic trek through clouds of mosquitoes and ''gigantic leeches'' to find a stand of about 5000 Wimmera bottlebrushes.
Bleating tree frog. Bleating tree frog.
The Wimmera bottlebrush (callistemon wimmerensis) was recently described and listed in Victoria as endangered.
''It was only given its name in 2008, when it was first published as a species,'' he says.
Last month, a spider orchid previously unknown in Victoria was found in the Discovery Bay Coastal Park, near Portland.
Mr Pitts says the limestone spider-orchid was known only in South Australia and Western Australia, and that a small colony of 500 plants has now established itself in Victoria.
''It's tricky to find because it only flowers for a week … and only grows in limestone soil,'' he says.
Closer to Melbourne, the swamp bush-pea was down to a few thousand plants in the Wombat State Forest and the Kinglake National Park.
Following the fires of 2009, the population has spawned.
''Possibly in the millions,'' says Dr Arn Tolsma, of the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research.
Dr Tolsma says numbers will probably subside because of competition from other plants species with more efficient root systems.
He says the swamp bush-pea was probably a highly visible plant prior to European settlement, when the swamps that once dominated the area that became the city of Melbourne were drained and populated.