Women botanical artists have made many contributions to horticulture and botany. One of these was Wendy Walsh (1915-2014). English by birth, she also lived in Japan and the United States before settling in Ireland in 1958 at the age of 43. She lived and worked there the rest of her long life, providing illustrations for 33 books, many on Irish gardening and native plants.
Her masterpieces were “An Irish Florilegium,” published in 1983, followed by “An Irish Florilegium II” in 1987. Each contains beautifully printed copies of 48 watercolor paintings that she drew from nature. Roughly, a third of these plants are native to Ireland, while an Irish botanist or plant collector introduced another third. The rest celebrate the cultivars developed by the many fine nurseries and plant hybridizers of that nation.
E. Charles Nelson, a taxonomist with the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin in Dublin, wrote the extensive plant notes to both volumes and the introduction to the second. Although he was 36 years younger, he and Walsh became fast friends after meeting at the beginning of this project. Their collaboration led to several more books, including three in the Miller Library.
Excerpted from the Winter 2019 Arboretum Bulletin