ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

ROSEMARY WISE

Colin Hughes (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

Rosemary Wise started work as a botanical illustrator in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, U.K., in 1965. She is still drawing and painting plants almost 60 years later.

Rosemary’s work spans plants as well as insects, including both black-and-white line drawings and watercolor paintings. She has illustrated numerous books, monographs, and scientific papers. Despite the fact that legumes comprise just a small fraction of her prodigious portfolio, Rosemary has probably illustrated as many legumes as any other botanical artist. She has assembled monographic sets of botanical drawings for a substantial set of legume genera alongside miscellaneous individual legume species, illustrating well over 600 legume species in total. These include large, and in some cases comprehensive, sets of drawings for the genera Amicia, Andira, Gliricidia, Inga, Leucaena, Lupinus, and Parkia, alongside a complete set of African ‘Acacias,’ i.e., all the Vachellia and Senegalia species of Africa.

Rosemary was awarded the prestigious annual international Jill Smythies Award for published botanical illustration by the Linnean Society of London. Ten years ago, to celebrate her 50 years at Plant Sciences in Oxford, she was awarded the Sibthorp Medal for “lifetime services to botany” by the University of Oxford.

To know more about her work, visit Oxford: Rosemary Wise Botanical Illustration and Rosemary Wise | Department of Biology.

Lupinus mutabilis, the Andean crop lupin, illustrating the mutability of flower color. Copyright: Rosemary Wise. Published in 2018 in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 35 (2): pp. 134–148.

Mimosa suberosa, a Bolivian endemic. Copyright: Rosemary Wise. Published in Atahuachi & Hughes 2006. Two new species of Mimosa (Fabaceae) endemic to Bolivia. Brittonia 58(1): 59–65.

Andira taurotesticulata from NW South America. Copyright: Rosemary Wise. Published in: Pennington R.T. 2003. Monograph of Andira (Leguminosae-Papilionoideae). Systematic Botany Monographs 64: 1–143.