The Botanical World of Raymond Booth Online Exhibition

From the 1970s Booth corresponded with Don Elick, an American living in Japan. An expert in Japan’s plant species, the pair wrote regularly discussing plants and their habitat. In addition to letters, many packages of seeds and roots passed between them, and Booth’s paintings of the resulting plants developed into a collaboration of an exhibition and book Japonica Magnifica. Despite being cultivated widely in Japan for centuries Mahonia Japonica is not native to Japan.

Booth was a keen and knowledgeable planstsman. This extremely pretty iris has large cream flowers with deep violet and purple falls, crested with gold and yellow at the base of the petals. Originating from river valleys in Tajikistan, it’s a rare and beautiful iris.

Before the widespread use of herbicides, Papaver rhoeas was found in abundance in agricultural fields. Its delicate flowers are fleeting and Booth captured the plant in full bloom depicting the petals unfurling from the bud and the plant’s seed capsule.

There is a beautiful honesty to Booth’s work. Whilst painting the regal flowers of lilium henryi he also focused his attention upon the bulb, its richly coloured plump and fleshy scales and root system. His skilled and delicate brushwork ensured they are depicted in detail.

Booth considered apples an ideal tree for small gardens, providing blossom in the springtime and decorative fruits in autumn that are delicious. He also advocated their growth as a means of encouraging wildlife into the garden.

Found in small streams, wet grassland or marshy slopes of Africa it can be an incredibly useful plant for gardeners with damp spots in their garden. In its native habitat the plant is occasionally harvested for food.

Commonly known as torch lilies or red hot pokers the dense, erect spikes of kniphofia provide a brilliant and long-lasting display of colour in flaming reds and yellows.

Paeonia mlokosewitschii is native to the Caucasus and is often fondly referred to as “Molly the Witch.” Grown from seed this unusual and slow growing specimen would have taken Booth many years to establish.

Native to the mountains of Szechuan and Yunnan, Lilium taliense with tall stems crowned with plentiful clusters of flowers is an example of the rarer specimen of lily that Booth grew. He advised gardeners that ‘the lily genus is exceptional in that every member is worth growing’.

Nerine angustifolia are native to South Africa where they inhabit grassland marshes. Flowering late in the summer and autumn they provided Booth with specimens to paint when many other plants had finished flowering.

This small compact shrub was amongst Booth’s favourite Rhododendron. Feeling it was suitable for many spaces he declared that it ‘should be in every garden’. Studying the plant throughout a number of seasons he depicted it in full flower and also recorded the bronze-coloured leaves that it develops during the colder winter months.

Booth would plan the order in which he worked based on which plants would flower next. In the dark winter months, he lamented the lack of daylight noting: ‘there’s a little queue of orchids coming on to flower, just the right size and condition. Light, give me more light’. Eventually investing in a spotlight provided him with the additional light required to garden and paint in the winter.

Booth’s greenhouses and conservatory were always full of orchids. He grew them with great patience and care with some species taking seven or eight years to flower for him.

Paphiopedilum, often called the Venus slipper, is a genus of the lady slipper or chid. The name is formed using Paphia, one of the surnames of Aphrodite, and pedilon meaning a sandal, the genus translates to “Aphrodite’s sandal”. This is in reference to the bulbous labellum or lip which is the orchid’s trademark characteristic.

Whilst walking in the woods around his home Booth developed a deep love of the natural world. As well as picturing the plants he grew as specimens he portrayed the animals he encountered in his garden and the nearby woods.

These rose studies by Raymond Booth were among the mountains of paintings which never left his painting room in his lifetime, only to be discovered by curator Peyton Skipwith when he was asked by Raymond’s wife Jean to clear it out after his death in 2015. Many were half-finished, abandoned partway, deemed failures by the unsentimental artist. But Peyton has other thoughts on these roses: “Raymond himself, if consulted, might have destroyed the sheet of studies of a rose as being too scrappy, but to me the succulent, almost tactile, quality of the individual blossoms, buds and leaves made it irresistible.”

Booth was just as intrigued by plants in their dormant state, and he regularly illustrated the dried stems and paper-thin leaves of last year’s growth with root systems intact. This delightful study of an iris bulb illustrates the bulb’s crisp outer tunic. With his skilled and delicate brushwork, you wonder if you could hear the outer layers crunch under the lightest touch from a gardener’s hand.

Booth grew over fifty different species of fritillary in order to study them. Growing them in pots in his garden, they often needed careful nurturing to replicate the conditions of their native Alpine habitats.

Whilst painting the nodding flowers of this hellebore, Booth focused his attention upon the fleshy petals of its delicate flowers and its glossy leathery leaves. This, however, was not a depiction of a flawless plant and he pays as much attention to the curling edges of leaves, beginning to brown and enter initial stages of decay as to unfurling stems of new growth.