I think that beauty saved me. I remember during a very emotionally hard time of my life going outside into the newly-turned-spring world and finding a a plant covered with little brilliant blue flowers that had funny tiny white antennae-like things trembling over their white-framed center. I looked it up in a flower book. Bird’s eye speedwell! A perfect name! Delightful! I tumbled into a sort of joy that morning, and from then on I’ve been hooked on nature’s beauty upon which I’ve since built my world. I embarked, with my husband’s carpentry support, into redesigning our garden and building it up into a showcase for interesting plants. When I retired from my position as a writing teacher in a college, I took an internship at a local botanic garden, and now I have a limited business providing design and maintenance services. I began volunteering in the Everglades National Park winters in the botany department, monitoring and cataloguing plants and developing a tree key.

In my art, I try to utilize my botanical knowledge to represent the entirety of a plant, but I also endeavor to present it in an artistic way. Despite the beautiful advances in nature photography, there is still a place for the botanical artist, who can separate the plant from the background, and manipulate the specimen to