Sarah qualified in 1978 as a Landscape Architect. The 4 year diploma course at Cheltenham College of Art included three terms at Pershore College of Horticulture where she learned all the plants and their Latin names. 

She went to Anne-Marie Evan’s classes at Southfield College, Leicester in 1989 having seen an article about them in the Leicester Mercury. It was there that, as she liked to paint dry, she was introduced to vellum. She joined the newly-formed Leicester Society of Botanical Illustrators made up from Anne-Marie’s past students and they met on Wednesdays in Leicester. By the time Jenny Brasier came to give a talk on her work on vellum she was already completely hooked. She put work into the RHS in 2000 and got an encouraging silver-gilt medal for “Fruits on Vellum”. Taking on board all the advice from the judges she entered again in 2002 “Exotic Fruits on Vellum” but got another silver-gilt, so she didn’t put herself through it again. She felt consoled when Brent Elliot of the RHS bought her painting of ‘Mangosteens’ from the “Exotic Fruits” exhibit for the RHS Lindley Library’s permanent collection. 

She joined the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society in about its second year, having been put forward by Anne-Marie, and she is now a Fellow with seven paintings in the Florilegium. Her paintings are in both of the books that the CPGFS have produced:  “Flower Paintings from the Apothecaries’ Garden” and “Botanical Illustration from Chelsea Physic Garden”, both by Andrew Brown. 

By 2002 she was painting almost exclusively on vellum and began teaching workshops in Sheffield, Birmingham, Gloucester, Dorset etc. She also ran two day residential vellum workshops in Chipping Camden and started teaching at the Chelsea School of Botanical Art with Helen Allen, based at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

In 2007 she exhibited four paintings at the Hunt Institute’s 12th annual exhibition and they appear in the 12th exhibition catalogue. Two of the paintings remain at the Hunt in their permanent collection. In the same year, Mally invited her to teach a vellum workshop after the Flori AGM and in 2009 she became an assessor for the Flori alongside Jenny Brasier. 

Through Chelsea Physic Garden and Helen Allen, she was invited to paint for the Highgrove Florilegium – on paper – and her painting of Narcissus poeticus is in the first volume. All the paintings from the two volumes of the Florilegium have been exhibited worldwide. Painting for the subsequent Transylvanian Florilegium was begun in 2012 and she was in the first party of eight artists who went out there to paint three paintings each of the wild flowers surrounding the Prince of Wales’ properties in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. In 2016 she was invited back to Transylvania to paint a further three subjects, so she has six paintings altogether in the Transylvanian Florilegium.