Royal Botanic Garden students find beauty in the world of garden weeds

However, with the most delicate of brushstrokes and remarkable attention to detail, a new generation of botanical illustrators has captured the graceful beauty of plants often regarded as pesky garden troublemakers.

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Common garden plants, invasive species and determined, prickly shrubs which seem to defy weather and weedkiller to spread at alarming rates, all feature in a collection of botanical illustrations which echo the skilled work of Victorian plant scientists tasked with recording exotic species for the first time.

Having been confined to their own gardens during pandemic restrictions and with a portfolio of work to create, final year students of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Botanical Illustration Diploma course sought inspiration from common plants in their own gardens - finding beauty in even the most unwelcome species.

Capturing the beauty in garden weeds

The results of their efforts have been gathered in an online degree show exhibition which showcases their work and serves as a reminder that spring and those troublesome garden foes are just around the corner.

The botanical illustrator’s skill combines art, nature and science, presenting plants in faithful detail at various stages of the seasons, even down to the tiniest of stem hairs, nodes, intricate leaf patterns and tangled root systems.

Painted in delicate watercolours, plants which may have gardeners throwing down their spades in despair such as nettles, ivy, invasive rhododendron ponticum, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed emerge as pretty as a picture.

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One of the RBGE course’s Class of 2022 graduates, Yvonne Dawe, 68, a retail buyer who had no background in art, captured the plants she found growing wild along the shoreline around Kirkcudbright near the cottage where she stayed at the height of the pandemic.

Her portfolio includes an illustration showing three leafy stems of Urtica Dioica – stinging ‘nettles’ – and Rosa spinosissima, the prickly and tough shrub more commonly known as Scotch rose, and Hedera helix, aka ivy.

She said the strict discipline involved in botanical illustration gave her deeper appreciation of the beauty hiding behind some plants’ more beastly image.

“Not many people choose to paint nettles, usually we stay away from them, they sting and people don’t like them much.

“Eventually I’d handled them so much, I seemed to become immune to the sting.

“It’s only when you start to study them, you realise they are quite interesting and fancy, with their little flowers.

“I didn’t know, for example, that there are male and female nettles, and that if you sit by nettles on a hot summer’s day you can hear them pop as the seed pods open.

“Or that ivy start to flower in November and have black berries.

“We tend to just walk by and regard these plants as weeds and not fully appreciate how beautiful and important they are to other species.”

Fellow graduate, Amelia Campanile, painted the invasive species found growing within a mile of her Fife home – including Himalayan balsam, with its distinctive pale pink flowers.

Introduced to the UK in 1839, each plant produces up to 800 seeds in a single year, with each capable of surviving up to two years without germinating - leading to its rapid spread.

Artist Ingrid Arthur's work is captured in online degree show

While artist Ingrid Arthur, 62, focused on illustrating the hardy garden flowers she recalled her mother growing in her Shetland childhood home: pink lupins, a prickly wild rose, woody stemmed flowering currant and honeysuckle.

“People look at a plant like the wild rose and see a weed – it’s very invasive and seen as a nuisance,” she said.

“When you study it close – as you have to do when you are illustrating it - you see it has its own beauty.

“It is very a very plucky plant and very beautiful.”

The RBGE Diploma in Botanical Illustration course spans up to three years and attracts students from around the world, both in person and online.

This year’s graduates came from as far afield as Switzerland, UAE, Norway and Italy, leading to a wide range of plant species reflecting the landscape outside individual artists’ homes and studios.

The works include illustrations of olives, pine trees and pistachio trees from one student in Turkey, richly coloured irises, lily of the valley and tulips from an Italian garden and Devon hedgerow plants – hawthorn, blackberry, dog rose and honeysuckle.

Capturing the beauty in garden weeds

The works include illustrations of olives, pine trees and pistachio trees from one student in Turkey, richly coloured irises, lily of the valley and tulips from an Italian garden and Devon hedgerow plants – hawthorn, blackberry, dog rose and honeysuckle.

A portfolio by Dr Amelia Grass, a senior lecturer in Natural History at the University of South Wales, of native wildflowers found on the campus’s restored meadows, was awarded the Lizzie Sanders Award for Excellence in recognition of her remarkable attention to the finest detail.

Jacqui Pestell, RBGE Director Botanical Illustration, said: “When a botanical illustrator chooses to create something in detail, they are trying to draw out features and make sure we can see all the elements that are important and often important for identification.

“A straightforward photograph might not be at the perfect angle or it might miss something, or not show the level of detail

“These paintings are worked on with real precision and become scientific documents - not just a nice picture.”

The online exhibition can be viewed at www.rbge.org.uk