0n Sunday, 18th May, at the stunning RBSA Gallery in Birmingham, a host of botanical artists and guests gathered to celebrate the result of 2 ½ years of planning and painting for the Botanical Art Worldwide Exhibition 2025. Out of 50 paintings that had been submitted, 34 paintings by 29 artists from the UK and…
Celebrating Botanical Art at the Eden Project – Special Exhibition May 17 & 18 2025 For one weekend only, visitors to the Eden Project can experience the world where art and science meet, through a special exhibition of botanical illustrations by the Eden Project Florilegium Society (EPFS). Taking place May 17 & 18, 2025, the…
Watercolour course now open for booking 2025, £350 with lunches This watercolour course at the Sawpit Studio, Heligan, will be using the height of summer’s colours and textures to inspire us for four days of botanical relaxation. With a fully catered two-course lunch each day we will be able to focus all our energy on…
By Fay-Wei Li and Jacob Suissa, illustrated by Laura Silburn. Out on 15th May, available for pre-order from https://www.nhbs.com
Florilegium member Elizabeth-Jane Grose is showing a different strand of her art practice as part of the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. The work she is exhibit, ‘Lundy Hole’ is one of a new series of works that comes out of the process of walking the Cornish section of the South…
Selina, one of our Honorary Florilegium Members has produced a beautiful book describing a diverse range of 50 people who she calls the Flower Finders in Cornwall, dating from Richard Carew who compiled the first Cornish plant list during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1st right through to Yssy, currently a young girl with a fascination for bees and pollinating plants.
Our Vice Chair Laura Silburn is delighted to have been selected for the Oak Springs Garden Foundation botanical art residency.
Due to other commitments Laura is not able to participate in 2024 but the Foundation have kindly allowed a deferral to 2025.
EPFS fellow Dominica Williamson has continued to gain funding with artist Hilary Jean Gibson to run an Art club as part of the Charity Friends of the Towans.Dominica focuses on Botanical Illustration for families through day long workshops. She also promotes EPFS at these events and shares its archive through imagery.
We were very lucky to have one of our assessors – Chris Bisson – giving the presentation at our AGM in 2023. Chris assesses the botanical accuracy of paintings being submitted into the archive, and he came to talk about herbaria as this is something we are developing in the Flori at the moment, so that in future there is an herbarium specimen of almost every plant painted for the archive. Listening to Chris and writing this article was both an interesting and educational exercise for me. I needed to research the people he referred to and looked at the links he gave for online websites and documents; some are updated (all the links are below), and it was fascinating to find out more about the history of herbaria and who was involved. He gave us so much useful information and I have tried to include as much as I can. I also added a new book to my collection. Now I am preparing my first specimens for the Flori herbarium and feel a lot more confident about doing it right.
