Renowned Artist Margaret Stonesâ€™s Medicinal Plant Illustrations on Display

Louisiana State University (LSU) is highlighting selected watercolor drawings of Louisiana’s edible and medical botanicals by eminent botanical artist Margaret Stones. The illustrations will be on display at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library through October 23, 2010.¹

The exhibition, “A Beneficial Harvest: Edible and Medicinal Plants from Flora of Louisiana,” pairs early botany books with 26 paintings of useful plants from LSU’s collection of more than 200 of Stones’s botanical illustrations, titled “The Native Flora of Louisiana.”

Stones was commissioned to create 6 watercolor drawings of Louisiana botanicals in 1976 to celebrate the US Bicentennial and the 50^th anniversary of LSU’s Baton Rouge campus.² The initial project was so lauded that it was extended until 1987, and Stones continued to return to Louisiana after that until she had illustrated hundreds of the state’s indigenous plants (E. Smyth, e-mail, August 13-26, 2010).

“Her art is just incredible,” said botanical artist Peggy Duke, whose husband and collaborator Jim Duke, PhD—renowned ethnobotanist and author, and an ABC founding Trustee—gave her a copy of Flora of Louisiana: Watercolor Drawings by Margaret Stones in the late 1990s (oral communication, August 26, 2010). “Her colors are perfect, and she does lovely highlights,” said Mrs. Duke, adding that Stones’s careful dissections will be of particular interest to botanists.

Elaine Smyth, head of special collections for LSU Libraries, is pleased to have Stones’s illustrations on display “because they reward close attention,” she said. “After looking at one of these drawings, when I encounter the plant in the wild, I see it differently and in more detail. This new way of seeing is a gift the artist gives us through her work.”

Now 90 years of age, Stones was born in 1920 in Victoria, Australia. After studying art and botany, she set off for England, where she dreamed of working as a botanical artist. Talent and good fortune brought her employment at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She also spent 25 years as the principle artist of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the world’s oldest botanical periodical. Her other major collection, “The Endemic Flora of Tasmania,” was completed between 1967 and 1978, partially overlapping with her LSU-sponsored work.²

“In person,” said Smyth, “the artist is just as lovely, lively, and composed as her work. She made so many friends here in Louisiana during her work on the Louisiana Flora project. We all feel privileged to have shared not only her art but also her company.”

Among Stones’s paintings featured in “A Beneficial Harvest” are “Yellow Candy Root” (Polygala nana), which was used by the Seneca Indians to treat snakebites; “Golden Colic-Root” (Aletris aurea), which colonial Americans used as a sedative; and “Purple Coneflower” (Echinacea purpurea), used to treat a number of health problems. Also featured are illustrations of wild ginger (Hexastylis arifolia), potato bean (Apios americana), Carolina buckthorn (Rhamnus caroliniana), lyre-leaved sage (Salvia lyrata), and more (E.Smyth, e-mail, August 13, 2010).

The exhibition is free and open to the public. Stones’s paintings of Louisiana’s flora can also be viewed at www.louisianadigitallibrary.org.

—Ashley Lindstrom

Photo caption:

Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea, [L.] Moench). Watercolor drawing by Margaret Stones, from the “Native Flora of Louisiana Collection” at Louisiana State University. ©2010 Special Collections, LSU Libraries.

HerbalEGram: Volume 7, Number 9, September 2010

Renowned Artist Margaret Stones's Medicinal
Plant Illustrations on Display

HerbalEGram: Volume 7, Number 9, September 2010

Renowned Artist Margaret Stones's Medicinal Plant Illustrations on Display

Renowned Artist Margaret Stones's Medicinal
Plant Illustrations on Display