Can You Dig It?

Break out those gardening gloves! It's National Lawn and Garden Month.

Mary Vaux Walcott (1860–1940) received a set of watercolor paints at age eight and began experimenting with painting flowers.… The family spent summers in the Canadian Rockies where Mary and her brothers studied mineralogy and recorded the flow of glaciers in drawings and photographs.

After 1887 Mary returned to western Canada almost every summer with her brothers and became an active mountain climber, outdoorswoman, and photographer. One summer a botanist asked her to paint a rare blooming arnica; her success in recording the flower encouraged her to concentrate on botanical illustration.

For many years, on foot or horseback, Walcott explored difficult terrain looking for important flowering species to paint.

Source: Andrew L. Connors. North American Wild Flower Paintings by Mary Vaux Walcott (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1994).

Pictured: Mary Vaux Walcott, 1860 USA–1940 Canada, Mountain Rose-Bay (Rhododendron catawbiense), 1932, watercolor on paper, 10 x 7 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.