Fanny Osborne
From both scientific and artistic points of view, Fanny Osborne’s paintings of the flowers of the indigenous trees, shrubs, vines and herbs of Great Barrier are exceptional and superbly crafted examples of botanical illustration. They
Category Archives: Science > Botany
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Marianne North
English naturalist and flower-painter
Martha King
Martha King was New Zealand’s first resident botanical artist.
Georgina Burne Hetley
She is remembered as a forceful personality, singleminded in the pursuit of her goal to paint New Zealand’s indigenous flora before it was destroyed by the advance of cultivation.
Adrienne Clarke
Professor Adrienne Clarke is an Australian scientist whose research contribution to the field of plant genetics, and to commercial ventures that developed from that research, is recognised nationally and abroad.
Kathleen Maisey Curtis
Kathleen Maisey Curtis, who later became Lady Rigg, was an exemplary scientist who specialised in mycology and botany and was a founder of plant pathology in New Zealand.
Nancy Mary Adams
Nancy Adams was a botanist, botanical artist and museum curator whose significant contributions to botany included the illustrations for more than 40 publications on New Zealand’s native plants, alpine areas, and common trees, shrubs and flowers, and her 1994 work Seaweeds of New Zealand: an illustrated guide.
Winifred Lily Boys-Smith
Unlike many conservative supporters of sex-differentiated education, Boys-Smith saw the study of home science at university level as ‘a great force in the education of women’ – specifically, the higher education of women. She believed that because of changing social patterns domestic skills had increasingly come to be seen as menial. The educational programme set up by her for the School of Home Science sought to lift the status of the domestic arts by providing a strong scientific education, augmented with technical instruction. An emphasis on science, particularly chemistry, also served to silence those critics who believed that the School of Home Science belonged in a technical institute, not a university.
Maisie Carr
Maisie Fawcett overcame social disadvantage and grasped opportunities that took her to the forefront of a field rarely embraced by women. When most of Australia’s few ecologists were male, Maisie undertook ground-breaking ecological research that revealed unequivocally the damaging effects of cattle on the vegetation and soils of a major Australian water-catchment. She challenged cattlemen’s claims by showing that shrubs, not grasses, regenerated in cattle-eroded grasslands and predicted that grasses, not shrubs, would regenerate under senescing shrubs – eventually confirmed when 1939 fire-regenerated shrubs senesced after Maisie’s death in 1988.
Margaret Rose Preston
Margaret Preston was a leading painter, printmaker and designer.