There have been images of plants as long as humans have been making pictures, but botanical art has not always enjoyed elevated status. “When I started collecting, people were rather patronising about it,” admits Dr Shirley Sherwood, the woman behind the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Indeed, in another life, Dr Sherwood might herself have been a botanical artist. “When you do botany you need to know how ‘that leaf’ is attached to ‘that stem’,” she explains. “You need to draw it. I was offered a job in Oxford as a botanical artist but at that time it was very much at the back of a herbarium. Botanical art was belittled; you didn’t even sign your work.”
Instead, Dr Sherwood has led an extraordinary, labyrinthine life – “complicated but pretty sensible”. It