Botanical art has its roots in medieval illuminated herbals, when monastic apothecaries drew medicinal plants with surgical precision. During the Renaissance this knowledge blossomed in the gardens of the Medici, Este and Gonzaga families: botanist-apothecaries gathered exotic species, and painters such as Giovanna Garzoni immortalised fruits, flowers and insects on parchment, fusing anatomical rigour with chromatic poetry.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, botanical art became a tool of imperial exploration. Maria Sibylla Merian sailed to Suriname and, with an ecological eye ahead of her time, portrayed tropical butterflies alongside their host plants; meanwhile Elizabeth Blackwell engraved more than 500 plates for A Curious Herbal (1737), paying for her husband’s release from prison and proving that botany, storytelling and female entrepreneurship can coexist.
The next century brought iron-and-glass Victorian glasshouses, colour periodicals and artists such as Matilda Smith (the first official artist of Kew Gardens) and Marianne North, who travelled alone through Amazonia, India and Australia, painting on rough wooden boards. With her floral collages on black backgrounds, the seventy-two-year-old Mary Delany amazed London society, while Linnaeus hailed her “paper mosaicks” as “flowers reborn in winter.”
Photography did not end botanical art but transformed it: in 1843 Anna Atkins published the first book illustrated with cyanotypes, Prussian-blue silhouettes of algae that became minimalist scientific icons. In the twentieth century, figures such as Margaret Mee documented rare Amazonian plants to denounce deforestation, Mary Vaux Walcott painted Rocky Mountain orchids with taxonomic detail, and Clarissa Munger Badger combined watercolours with poetry, foreshadowing today’s “sentimental flora” design.
Today botanical art is enjoying a hybrid renaissance: artists like Pandora Sellars, Makiko Taguchi, Silvia Molteni and Chiara Ongaro experiment with pigments extracted from plant waste, collaborate with university botanic gardens and use augmented reality to let painted plants “rotate” on our smartphones. Thus the home studio becomes both scientific lab and social platform, keeping alive a language that merges beauty with research.
A few colourful curiosities: during the Dutch Tulipomania (1636), watercolours of rare tulips served as certificates of authenticity for bulbs that had yet to bloom; many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters used arsenic-based greens, paying for brilliance with chronic dermatitis; in 1997 NASA sent miniature replicas of desert-flower watercolours by Donia Benoit into orbit to honour botanical art in extreme environments.
From illuminated herbals to AR apps, botanical art has offered women in particular a rare space of authority, weaving science and creativity into a single green stem.
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