Hilde Orye

Stella Ross-Craig (1906–2006)
One of the great names in 20th-century botanical illustration. Stella Ross-Craig worked for many years at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where she combined botanical knowledge with remarkable artistic skill.
Her best-known achievement is Drawings of British Plants: an impressive 31-volume series containing more than 1,300 botanical plates. Her distinctive black-and-white pen drawings are precise, elegant and exceptionally rich in botanical detail.
Ross-Craig also produced beautiful watercolours and more than 200 illustrations for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.
For her, botanical drawing was above all a way of observing, understanding and scientifically documenting plants.
I’ve just added 29 volumes of her collected works to my library.
A little piece of botanical illustration history that has now landed right on my desk.