Wendy Walsh is Ireland's most respected botanical artist. Jane Powers pays a visit for her 90th birthday
'My greatest ambition in life was to go to school," says Wendy Walsh, who is 90 today. "I lived in a curious old age when my mother, who hated school, wouldn't let any of her girls go to school. So I had a governess, and never had another lesson after I was 14." Her mother encouraged her to draw and paint, however, activities that a very young Wendy had been performing "ever since I could hold a pencil. It was all I wanted to do".
It was her mother, likewise, who gave her a box of professional watercolours when she was 14. Seventy-six years on, she still uses the same paintbox; it's a little worn, and the colour in the tiny porcelain half-pans has been replaced many times. But the thousands of images that have hatched from its insides have made its owner Ireland's most respected botanical artist.
They have also earned her a clatter of medals and awards - from the prestigious Royal Horticultural Society, the Alpine Garden Society and the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland - as well as honorary lifetime memberships of the Royal Dublin Society and the Irish Garden Plant Society. Yet the thing that "made me laugh and delighted me so much", she says radiantly, was when, in 1997, an honorary doctorate was conferred on her by Trinity College Dublin. "It struck me as funny that someone who had never been to school could call themselves doctor. It pleased me more than almost anything."
Her best-known work is probably the two-volume An Irish Florilegium: Wild and Garden Plants of Ireland, a handsome production with text by Dr E. Charles Nelson, former taxonomist at the National Botanic Gardens and her collaborator on many other publications. Besides illustrating another 10 or more botanical books, Walsh painted several series of stamps in the 1970s and 1980s of Irish flora and fauna (as well as a set of stamps for the Gilbert Islands, part of Kiribati, in 1978).
She also designed plates for Belleek and worked with Sybil Connolly, designing tableware, bed linen and fabric for Tiffany & Co and Brunschwig & Fils. Connolly's famous range of china for Tiffany, based on the 18th-century flower collages of Mrs Delany, was Walsh's work.
Her botanical drawings are meticulous, minutely observed (right down to the texture of a hair on a stem) and, as you would expect from a world-class artist, rigorously anatomically correct. The best of them have a singular poignancy and joyfulness, as if she has seen into the soul of the plant. Her fellow botanical artist Susan Sex, who has painted the current series of Irish wild-flower stamps, admires her quiet mastery. "Beautifully understated, with nothing showy or overly dramatic about it," she says. "Her finest work is uniquely good and true to the plant. There is nothing better than it."
Walsh's lack of formal education has not held her back. She is a voracious reader and avid researcher, and the self-taught techniques she applies to her painting make it particularly distinctive. She is a total natural but never naive.
She is also a generous teacher, according to Sex. "You could go to classes and courses, but no one was prepared to absolutely give you everything that they have, as she was." Walsh still loves teaching, and she still gives lessons.
Her studio, in Co Kildare, is a tall, airy space in a converted stable yard. She paints only by daylight, which shines in from the large window behind her, her small form poised on two cushions ("I need the height") on a straight chair. An elegant swan's feather at her elbow is for gently whooshing the eraser crumbs off her paper, so they don't leave a mark. Her spectacles are a pair she got in 1954. "I'm lucky with my eyes. I can read a paperback in bed at night," she says. "I have good eyes and a steady hand - the two essentials."
Last year she painted between 20 and 30 pieces, each taking "inside a week" to complete. "Composition is very important," she says, "so I often do a few pencil lines to give the plant a place on the paper." Then, she says, it's a question of starting with the part of the plant that's going to die, or change, first. "If it's a hellebore, you paint the flower first, then the bud, then the leaves and, last of all, the stalk. On a thing like a wild rose you probably start on the bud, because it is going to open out first."
She warns: "It's very important to know your colours. I do reckon now that if I look at a flower I can reproduce its colour at once. Even the 'Molly Sanderson' black pansy, I know exactly how to make that black. I don't have black in my paintbox. I make it with brown and blue."
Despite her confidence and expertise, Walsh didn't start her career as a botanical painter until she was in her 60s, when her first stamps of Irish flora were issued. The first volume of An Irish Florilegium was published when she was 68. And she has plenty more to do. Her work is an invaluable record of the vanishing Irish landscape and its flora and fauna. "I don't like to see the countryside or wild animals being destroyed," she says with some passion.
"I think I like representing things I love. I don't have the slightest wish to pickle a cow in formaldehyde," she says with a big laugh. And then she summons her black - or brown-and-blue - dog, Tansy, to go for a walk.
To mark Wendy Walsh's 90th birthday, a set of prints of four paintings of hellebores has been published. Each print (in an edition of 600) costs €100 (plus €2.50 p&p); the set of four costs €320. Contact Burtown House, Athy, Co Kildare, 059-8623148, www.wendyfwalsh.com
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ON THE LOOKOUT FOR SPRING FLOWERS?
Daffodil fanciers will be in narcissus heaven this afternoon when the "amateur championship for daffodils" class comes to the spring show of South County Dublin Horticultural Society. The class (show-speak for a competition category), which comes under the umbrella of the Northern Ireland Daffodil Group, roves from venue to venue each year. This is the first time it has come south of the Border. Besides the championship, the show includes 50 other classes for daffodils and 50 for pot plants, cacti, alpines, vegetables and cut flowers. Plants for sale also. The show is at Knox Hall, Monkstown Road, Monkstown, Co Dublin, from 2pm to 5pm. Admission is €3.
On Friday, between 9.30am and 1pm at the College of Further Education, Main Street, Dundrum, Dublin 14, the floristry and garden-design students are holding a plant sale to fund a trip to the botanic gardens and flower markets in Amsterdam. Indoor and outdoor plants, alpine arrangements, hanging baskets and floral arrangements will be for sale, as will home-made cakes.
Next Saturday, from 2.30pm at Taney Parish Centre, Taney Road, Dublin 14, the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland is holding a plant sale and floral art spring show.