Botanic woman

Published on Saturday 10 March 2007 00:58

AS politicans and cultural agencies emphasise the development of new links between Scotland and Ireland, and the enhancement of traditional ones, horticulture is doing its bit.

That's if an exhibition of botanical illustration opening at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland at Glasnevin, Dublin, on Wednesday is anything to go by. Rooted in Ireland, mounted by the Dublin garden in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, explores botanical and horticultural bonds between Scotland and Ireland through the work of botanical illustrator Rodella Purves.

Not only do Purves's vivid and meticulously detailed watercolours portray the introduced plants and trees which flourish in gardens on either side of the Irish Sea, they evoke a lengthy history of collaboration between the countries in terms of plant collecting and cultivation. The RBGE's indoor curator, David Mitchell, is both a fan of Purves's art and a man with longtime connections with the Glasnevin garden.

He first became involved there 11 years ago as consultant for the renovation of its magnificent curvilinear range, one of the most important surviving 19th-century glasshouses in Europe.

In historical terms, he regards his role as "simply an extension of this great horticultural connection between the two countries in terms of shared expertise, shared plants and people coming and going between gardens, and not just at Glasnevin.

"I was speaking just this morning to someone at Belfast Botanic Garden, who reminded me that all the former curators there were Scottish," he says.

For Rodella Purves, the Dublin show has meant a journey back to childhood roots, and a transcending of recent illness. The Paisley-born daughter of a Welsh father and Irish mother recalls childhood autumn holidays in her mother's old home in County Leitrim, and the horse chestnut tree there which, as a young girl, she painted over and over again.

"I used to draw the chestnuts as they were just splitting open, revealing the lovely glossy brown conkers," she recalls at her home and studio in Edinburgh's Juniper Green. Later in life, she would return to Leitrim to paint those same conkers, which bristle from one of the first images to greet visitors to the Glasnevin exhibition.

Described by the Dublin garden's director, Peter Wyse Jackson, as "one of Scotland's national treasures", Purves, who has been painting plants since the early 1970s, is one of relatively few Scottish artists working in the very collectable, and highly exacting, field of botanical illustration. Her work has been honoured by the Medal of Excellence in Botanical Illustration presented by the Linnean Society of London, and one of her paintings of the Himalayan blue poppy - which has become something of a signature plant for her - has been shown at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.

What's more, last year it featured in an exhibition of botanical art at the Sompo Japan Museum of Art in Tokyo (where, she adds, gleefully, it was hung next to Van Gogh's Sunflowers).

Coincidentally, the Himalayan blue poppy has in recent years become the floral emblem of both the RBGE and of the city of Edinburgh itself, and among Purves's paintings at Glasnevin are the glowing blue flowers of a particular hybrid, Meconopsis x sheldonii "Slieve Donard", named after the County Down nursery where it was crossed.

Another strikingly blue flower featured in the show is Agapanthus campanulatus, a dwarf strain which was named after David Moore, the Dundee-born curator at Glasnevin (he changed the spelling of his name from Muir to conceal his Scottish origins) between 1838 and 1879. Further links with Moore are illustrated by a luxurious Buddleja davidii "Glasnevin Blue", a "mysterious hybrid", as one authority describes it, of the butterfly bush which originated in upland China and now thrives on urban waste ground, as well as gardens everywhere. The ubiquitous shrub was first collected in the 1880s by Augustine Henry, also Dundee-born but brought up in County Derry.

He became an eminent forester and plant collector, ultimately taking the chair of forestry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin.

Another flower depicted in the exhibition, the orange Lilium henryi, also pays tribute to Henry, while the striking red "bottle brush" bloom of Callistemon citrinus "Splendens" was introduced to Ireland from Australia by yet another Scot, the doughty James Drummond, curator of the Cork Botanical Institute, who was still foraging through the Australian bush in his eighties.

Less colourful, but one of the most striking pictures in the show, is the luxuriant halo of needles, like an old-fashioned chimney sweep's brush, of Pinus montezumae. The specimen painted by Purves was procured by Mitchell from a garden near Castle Douglas, although there is also one growing at Glasnevin - the tree, originally from Mexico and Central America, does better in Ireland's milder climate than it does here, he says. Purves's reaction when Mitchell dumped the specimen, bristling with 2ft-wide whorls of needles, on her doorstep is not recorded.

One of the most vivid examples of an introduced shrub flourishing in its new environment must be the west of Ireland's ubiquitous red fuchsia hedges. In his introduction to the catalogue, Wyse Jackson points to Purves's painting of the Chilean shrub, Fuchsia magellanica, commenting that "many people, and not just visitors, imagine that it is one of our most cherished and characteristic indigenous plants".

Also in the catalogue, Stephen Blackmore, Regius Keeper at the RBGE, observes that art and science are too often regarded as polar opposites: "That both stem from the same creative spark is amply demonstrated in these beautiful botanical paintings by Rodella Purves." But these paintings, and the plant science informing them, are also playing their part in establishing closer links between countries and cultures. "The wonderful thing about botanical illustration, and indeed gardening," says Mitchell, "is that they're non-political, cross-party, cross-religion and they bring people together. Gardening is a great leveller. It doesn't matter whether you own a thousand acres or a window box, you're all gardeners together, and I think a lot more could be done in that direction."

• Rooted in Ireland runs at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, Glasnevin, Dublin, until 7 May. For further information, visit www.botanicgardens.ie