NEWS about Botanical Art and for Botanical Artists

SSBA Botanical Art Courses in Scotland 2022-24

25/7/2022

The NEW SSBA Botanical Art Introductory and Intermediate courses in the south (Dumfries) and north (Aviemore) of Scotland are now available for

EITHER booking Introductory Courses being held in October 2022
OR to note interest in the April 2023, October 2023 and April 2024 courses.

The courses are open to both SSBA members, other individuals and art groups in the south and north of Scotland who are interested in learning and developing their botanical art skills. The aim of the support is to provide better tuition in areas where it has been a scarce resource in the past.

The courses are spread over two Academic Years: Year 1 2022-23 and Year 2 2023-24.

In Year 1 there will be 2 beginner courses in autumn and 2 in spring.
In Year 2 there will be 2 intermediate courses in autumn and 2 in spring.
There will be 12 places per course.

Funded by the Finnis Scott Foundation Botanical Art Prize 2022,

the SSBA course tutoring plus tea, coffee and lunch during the course is provided FREE OF CHARGE to attendees.
However Attendees will need to cover their own personal costs for travel, art materials and, where required, accommodation, breakfast and dinner.

You can find details - including venues and suggested accommodation on:

the SSBA website - see SSBA Botanical Art Courses Scotland AND the PDF file below
this website - see the Scotland Section of my page about UK: Botanical Art Courses Classes, Courses and Workshops in England, Scotland and Wales in 2022-23

ssba-botanical-art-training-courses-scotland-information.pdf
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The real woman behind this website

17/7/2022

I got into botanical art because of my mother. The fact that this website exists starts with her.

Every year when I was young, Mummy always ordered an RHS Desk Diary. These had botanical illustrations at periodic intervals throughout the year. We were both intrigued by them and loved the illustrations of flowers, fruit and vegetables- particularly those by Redoute. Every year I looked forward to seeing her new one to see what new pleasures would be inside. Over time, once the diary was finished, plates were removed and inserted into frames and hung on the wall.

She also enjoyed art and I remember artwork she did for her local Women's Institute involving plants from every season. She was also very encouraging about my own artistic endeavours.

Then there was her love of plants and gardening and visiting gardens. As an adult, I lived in London and she continued to live in Cheshire. Most of my visits to her involved very long visits to plant centres, planting the garden and even longer visits to various gardens near her home in Cheshire. Latterly, as we both became less mobile together, we became very appreciative of gardens on the level - and rollators!

Nowadays I'm rather less mobile and mother (in her late seventies) is even less so. For those who like visiting gardens but have difficulty walking, Tatton is an excellent place to visit as it provides electric wheelchairs of the sort you see many older people now using to do their shopping. Mother whizzed around gravel paths and on and off grassy banks in one - she even managed the steep slope at the side of the Italian gardens! Fortunately I managed to persuade her to sharpen all my pencils for me before she started getting too ambitious!
Sketches from Tatton Park (June 2007) | Travels with a Sketchbook

I liked the way she always called plants by their correct Latin names and I now wander around gardens and identify plants as I go with names which just pop into my head. My knowledge of most of them can only come from listening to her over very many years.

As she became older and more arthritic, we devised new ways to garden at her home to take account of her mobility. I ran around uprooting weeds, pruning and generally licking the garden into better shape while she she sat in one spot filling the garden rubbish bin and making me cups of tea!

I saw her in June and spent some of my time moving all her big plant pots around so she had the best view of all the plants which were blooming just beyond the huge sliding windows which provided her with such an excellent view of her garden.

(She was tickled pink when my sketch of her garden (see below) was given the double page spread introducing section 2 "Deciding what to draw" in my book about sketching!)

A Cheshire Garden in July 2011 pen and ink and coloured pencil on Arches, 10" x 14" copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Video: Illustrating the night time blooming water lilies

5/7/2022

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Lucy Smith at her desk in Kew - with a giant water lily bud she's just dissected

(below) Further to yesterday's post A NEW Giant Water Lily - discovered and illustrated by Lucy Smith, some of you may be interested in video of some of the challenges of illustrating water lilies

Channel 5 have been collaborating with Kew Gardens to create an excellent series called Kew Gardens - A Year in Bloom which aired for the first time last year 2021. It's about the work of the gardens - and the people who work within it - who of course include botanical illustrators.

Episode 3 included a section on the work of Lucy Smith, one of Kew's freelance botanical illustrators, and the challenges she has faced when trying to get specimens of giant water lilies to draw and then paint.

This YouTube video (below) - posted by Channel 5, is has been compiled from extracts from Episode 3 of their series and is called "Trying to catch the night-time bloom of the Waterlilies"

In it you see:

the Waterlily House at Kew Gardens - completed in 1852 and designed specifically to showcase the giant Amazon waterlily (Victoria amazonica)
the Kew Herbarium (where seven million preserved vascular plant specimens are kept) and the Library
Lucy Smith at her desk in the building dissecting a very fresh giant water lily bud - being careful to avoid the prickles - and then explaining how it works for the purposes of reproduction

and here's the bud - and you can see how big it is from Lucy's hand behind it!

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A NEW Giant Water Lily - described and illustrated by Lucy Smith

4/7/2022

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have today announced the publication of a paper about the discovery of Victoria boliviana a brand NEW Giant Water Lily. Moreover it is now officially recognised to be the LARGEST in the world.

Oddly, the newly-named Victoria boliviana has actually been sitting in Kew’s Herbarium for 177 years - alongside Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziania..

A multi-disciplinary team of Kew experts - spearheaded by Kew's tropical horticulturist Carlos Magdalena and botanical illustrator Lucy T. Smith - have now revealed the plant to be new to science – the first giant water lily "discovery" in more than a century..

Lucy and Carlos with Victoria boliviana in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens

The paper’s authors decided to name the species in honour of Bolivian partners and the South American home of the waterlily where it grows in the aquatic ecosystems of Llanos de Moxos.
With flowers that turn from white to pink and bearing spiny petioles, V. boliviana is now the largest waterlily in the world, with leaves growing as wide as 3 metres in the wild.
The current record for the largest species is held by La Rinconada Gardens in Bolivia where leaves reached 3.2 metres.

The announcement is of particular interest to botanical illustrators for two reasons:

the discovery was stimulated by Lucy Smith's major personal project to illustrate the giant water lilies at Kew - after she had illustrated the smallest waterlily in the world.
Lucy provided the initial important evidence to prompt a major scientific investigation by a team of people (see below) after she demonstrated that one of the waterlilies she was investigating, documenting and recording was actually different to the two known giant waterlilies, as illustrated by Walter Hood Fitch in the 19th century.

You can read Lucy's account of the project in her new blog post on the topic - which she has been writing for the last four years - and provides the botanical illustrator's perspective on this amazing story of plant discovery - see Victoria boliviana - a new species of Giant Waterlily | Lucy Smith Blog (4th July 2022)

Delimitation of the Giant Water Lily Victoria:
the Scientific Project and Article

The title and authors of the original research article "Revised Species Delimitation in the Giant Water Lily Genus Victoria (Nymphaeaceae) Confirms a New Species and Has Implications for Its Conservation"

So it came to pass that, this morning at 5am, a new scientific paper Revised Species Delimitation in the Giant Water Lily Genus Victoria (Nymphaeaceae) Confirms a New Species and Has Implications for Its Conservation was published in the journal "Frontiers in Plant Science".

This paper lays out the evidence for:

the discovery of the first giant waterlily of the Victoria species in over a century - to be called Victoria boliviana
the declaration of a NEW largest waterlily in the world.