Celebrating the work of Irish botanical artists

25.11.2023 - 08:47 / irishtimes.com / Fionnuala Fallon

They say a picture tells a thousand words. But in the case of botanical art it’s fair to say that it’s probably far more than that, as proven by a magnificent new book Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art by the Wicklow-based art historian and author Patricia Butler (Acc Art Books UK, £35).

Charting the history and evolution of Irish botanical art from the early work of 17th-century artists such as James Gwim (who also contributed illustrations to Milton’s Paradise Lost), to a host of contemporary Irish artists, this is a meticulously-researched and beautifully-illustrated publication which is impressively comprehensive in its scope.

It’s also a fascinating record of interesting lives led by interesting people, whose talents as recorders of beauty leave behind a legacy that stretches out far beyond the world of botany and horticulture into the realms of craft and design as well as ecology and natural history.

Take, for example, the copperplate engravings of the remarkable 18th-century Irish botanical illustrator William Kilburn’s exquisite watercolour drawings of common native wildflowers, which feature in the first volume of William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, a field guide to the wild flowers of London published in 1777. Botanically exact in every detail, Kilburn’s drawing of a dandelion plant elegantly illustrates each developmental stage of the life cycle of this resilient native perennial weed. We see its bright golden flowers both tightly in bud and fully open, as well as its sculptural, globe-shaped seed-heads, the silver “clocks” or “Jenny Joes” that we all blew on as children.

In just one single drawing Kilburn succeeds in conjuring up the plant’s hollow, sap-filled flower stems, its coarse,