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A brush with nature

With a 40-year career that shows no sign of abating, octogenarian Marjorie Blamey is renowned for her exquisite drawings of wild flowers.
Ursula Buchan meets one of Britain’s leading botanical artists

Image: Marjorie Blamey painting in her Cornish garden in the mid-1990s

Anyone who meets Marjorie and Philip Blamey is struck by their remarkable enthusiasm, openness and appetite for work, even though they are both well into their 80s and have been involved in botanical illustration for nearly 40 years. Marjorie is among the most popular and commercially successful of all contemporary botanical painters, having hit the jackpot with her first field guide, The Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe, which, since its publication in 1974, has been translated into nine languages and sold more than a million copies.

Marjorie was born in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and spent her early years on the Isle of Wight and then in Surrey. ‘I loved painting and drawing but never thought I would take it up.’ Her latter education was spent at drama school, then the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art (RADA). After that, she earned her living partly as an actress, and partly as a portrait and landscape photographer. She had a keen interest in wildlife.

Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, she became engaged to Philip and spent time working as a Red Cross nurse and an ambulance driver. After the war, they bought and ran a dairy farm in Cornwall, unassisted for many years.

It was not until three of their four children left home that, in 1966 aged 48, Marjorie took up her brush again, to paint the wild flowers around the farm.
A friend suggested she enter some of her early paintings in the Cornwall Garden Society Flower Show in Truro. These were unframed and stuck to a wall with tape, but author Roy Genders was at the exhibition, and told his publishers he had found the illustrator he wanted for his next book.

Work in print

Foliage & Fruit

A page of conifers: from the original uncaptioned plate for The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (1989).
It depicts the range of tree forms, foliage and cones within Northern European conifers

Illustration by Marjorie Blamey

Marjorie was paid one guinea for each of the four pictures she produced for his Cottage Garden Flowers published in 1969. After that came Scented Wild Flowers of Britain published by William Collins. A meeting with Michael Walter, natural history editor at Collins, saw the start of a highly satisfactory association and friendship. Michael now works as a book ‘packager’ in France, and he steers all the Blamey book projects to publication.

Marjorie’s first big contribution to a Collins book was as illustrator to Richard Mabey’s Food for Free, published in 1972. Two years later came The Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe. Botanists from around Europe sent Marjorie batches of flowers, and it took her nearly two years to paint them all for this pocket-sized paperback field guide. She did a rough sketch first, then painted later, a page of illustrations at a time, all at one-and-a-half times life size. Still in print, it is Marjorie’s bestselling work.

This publication made her name, and the Blameys decided to give up the farm, build a house nearby, and Philip took over the business side. They bought a motor caravan, which Philip drove and Marjorie used as a mobile studio up until 2000, and travelled in northern Europe and the Mediterranean region, often with botanists with whom they collaborated on several books.
They recently moved to a beautifully-set house and garden near Plymouth, with a studio and office where they continue to work with great industry and seemingly undiminished enthusiasm.

Producing her art

Wild Orchids

One of the Ophrys (bee and fly orchids) plates from Mediterranean Wild Flowers (1993) from the original uncaptioned plate.
The plate shows the variety within this complex genus, whose members often hybridise freely

Illustration by Marjorie Blamey

‘I am a botanical illustrator, not an artist. I am not in the same class as those who work at Kew,’ Marjorie says modestly. ‘I have to be really fast if I’m to catch a plant before it dies, as I get so many sent to me at one time. I cannot take three or four weeks over one picture, and have to do up to 30 rough sketches a day.

‘I always measure the flower and parts carefully with a pair of dividers, and write copious notes. The drawings are botanically accurate. I love the small detail.’

What is obvious to the most casual observer is how fresh her flowers look on the page. ‘I like to make plants look alive and natural. I don’t like flatness. If there’s a hole in the leaf, I’ll put it in.’ She also uses Philip’s photographs taken on their travels, to give information on habit and habitat.

In the past, she has exhibited successfully, often at National Trust houses in the West Country such as Cotehele, and at Kew. Her exhibitions have always been sellouts, but she now concentrates solely on books.

She has won three gold medals from the RHS and two from the Alpine Garden Society; in 1991 she painted the Chelsea Plate for the RHS and, the following year, the Chelsea Vase, and her work also features on cards, tea towels and crockery.

Although she is best known for painting wild flowers, Marjorie has contributed to a number of books on garden flowers, has published two books on painting technique, and is also included in Shirley Sherwood’s Contemporary Botanical Artists (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1997, £20, ISBN 0297822705).

These achievements are quite something from an artist who says she is not proud about her lack of formal training, and had to develop her style simply by doing the work.

Neither Marjorie nor Philip say a word about retirement. Indeed, there are several projects in the pipeline, such as another field guide, Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland for A & C Black next spring; a new edition of Cassell’s Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe this autumn; and Wild Flowers of Crete with Chris Grey-Wilson. Field guides to the wild flowers of Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Holland should be published locally in the next few years.

Marjorie laughs, ‘I shall need to live to more than a hundred to complete all the work.’ Somehow, it does not seem impossible.

Ursula Buchan is a horticultural journalist and author

Marjorie Blamey’s books

Collins Learn to Paint: Flowers in Watercolour by Marjorie Blamey (Collins, £8.99, 1998, ISBN 0004133390)
Collins Mediterranean Wild Flowers, by Christopher Grey-Wilson (Collins, £16.99, 2001, ISBN 000710622X)
Collins Pocket Guide: Alpine Flowers of Britain and Europe, by Christopher Grey-Wilson (Collins, £14.99, 1995, ISBN 0002200171)
Collins Pocket Guide: Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe, by Richard and Alastair Fitter (Collins, £14.99, 1996, ISBN 0002200627)
Food for Free, by Richard Mabey (Collins, £9.99, 1989, ISBN 0002198657)

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