Celebrating Women in Science
OSGF
Flip through any of the Oak Spring Garden Library’s exhibits and online catalogues, and you’ll see beautiful, detailed illustrations of the world’s flora and fauna - many accompanied by the names of female naturalist-artists you’ve probably never heard of.
Prior to the last few decades, the work of women botanists and naturalists was, for the most part, profoundly under-recognized. While painting pretty flowers and animals was considered an acceptable pursuit for the female sex in earlier centuries, investigating their inner-workings was generally not - making the women who did so anyway all the more remarkable.
Despite modern advances - and the fact that some of history’s greatest researchers and innovators have been female, often working in spite of stifling legal and societal restraints - fields in science and technology are still dominated by men, with the UN reporting that only 30% of researchers worldwide are women. In order to change that statistic, the United Nations General Assembly established February 11th as International Day of Women and Girls in Science in 2015, an annual awareness holiday aimed at promoting women and girls in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.)
To celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re highlighting several historical women represented in OSGF’s library and online exhibitions whose work centered around plants - some who received more recognition than others during their lifetimes, but all inspiring. Read on to learn more.
Margaret Mee (1909-1988)
British Botanical artist Margaret Mee’s stunning illustrations of Brazil’s plantlife not only documented the astounding biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest, but drew worldwide attention to the large-scale mining and deforestation that was putting it at risk.
“Begonia egregia,” one of the illustrations Mee produced following her first expedition into the Amazon, from an An Oak Spring Flora.
Mee first found herself in Brazil in 1951, after traveling there to visit her ailing sister, and would go on to complete fifteen scientific and artistic expeditions into remote parts of the world’s largest rainforest. Her early paintings depicted flowers painted against white backgrounds, following the traditions of botanical art, but she soon began to include the plants’ intricate forest habitats in much of her work. As Mee gained recognition as an artist, she used her publications and appearances as a platform to advocate for the conservation of the Amazon. Her legacy includes the documentation of three new plants species that were named after her, over 400 folios and sketchbooks of illustrations, and the establishment of a fellowship program at Kew Gardens in London, which trains Brazilian botanical artists. Two Brazilian artists who participated in the program will join us at OSGF for our inaugural Botanical Artists in Residence program this Spring - read more about them here.
Johanna Helena Herolt (1668 - 1723)
“Two Tulips and Two Irises,” Johanna Helena Herolt
You’ve likely heard of celebrated naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian, but her eldest daughter was a talented artist and scientist in her own right. Herolt’s work shows both a sharp artistic eye and a fascination with biological processes such as decomposition, during a time when it was uncommon for botanical illustrators to include any imperfections in their depictions of plant life.
Herolt collaborated with her mother on many projects, including the popular The Insects of Suriname, the country where she lived for most of her life. While her paintings are often misattributed to her mother, Herolt had her own unique style, which is clear from the lush colors and dynamic compositions seen in her work. In addition to paintings, she also contributed an appendix on insects for Merian’s book on caterpillars, showing that she had a knack for science writing as well as illustration.
Tu YouYou (1930 - present)
Portrait by OSGF Head of Communications Max Smith. Read more about Tu YouYou in our Google Arts and Culture exhibit on medicinal plants.
“Mugwort,” another member of the genus artemisia, painted by another female medicinal plant researcher, Elizabeth Blackwell.
Pharmacologist Tu Youyou worked with plants in a different way than the scientific illustrators on this list - and her groundbreaking research would go on to save millions of lives.
In the late 1960s, Tu, then a researcher at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, was tasked with finding a cure for a quinine-resistant strain of malaria, a mosquito-borne illness that was wreaking havoc in Southern China. At the tail end of China’s Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals were viewed as a scourge on society, the assignment served as a protection from the persecution that many other scientists faced. After discovering in a hundreds-of-years-old text that sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) had been used as a malaria treatment, Tu and her team developed the drug Artemisinin, which would go on to slash mortality rates in Africa, Asia, and other places affected by the disease.
In 2015, Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her contributions, becoming the first woman from China to be recognized as a Nobel laureate. As of 2015, she was continuing her work by serving as Chief Scientist at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Elizabeth Wharton and Margaret Wharton (1700s-1800s)
“Wych Elm,” Elizabeth and Margaret Wharton, 1792/1827. This illustration takes depicts the different stages of the tree’s development and was signed by both sisters.
Little is known about British botanical artists Elizabeth and Margaret Wharton, except that the sisters’ work shows skill in both illustration and scientific observation. Born sometime in the eighteenth century to an upper class family, the sisters produced four volumes of botanical work between 1792 to 1827. From a brief biographical sketch about Elizabeth that appears as an insert in Volume I. of British Flowers, we can assume that she was the main contributor. The biography notes that Elizabeth possessed “a masculine understanding and judgement” before going on to describe the care she put into her research - an antiquated way of saying that she was very knowledgeable when it came to botany. Elizabeth died following a degenerative illness that resulted in paralysis and impaired sight, according to the biography.
While many botanical illustrators of the era were interested in flowers solely for their beauty and color, the care the Wharton sisters put into accurately reproducing the specimens they painted, examining and describing different aspects of their anatomy, and labeling them with their binomial nomenclature indicates a strong interest in the scientific side of their work, defying the gender expectations of their time.
Want to learn more about women working in plant-related sciences? Check out these other articles and videos from OSGF:
• Illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian
• Illustrator and medicinal plant expert Elizabeth Blackwell
• Botanical illustrator Dorothea Eliza Smith
• Ecological landscape designer Beatrix Ferrand
• Illustrator and mycologist Anna Maria Hussey