The Marvellous Marianne North: Adventurer, Botanist & Rulebreaker

The Marvellous Marianne North: Adventurer, Botanist & Rulebreaker

Lucy Panrucker

Marianne left an extraordinary legacy, she not only refused to conform to Victorian gender roles, but she also changed the course of botanical illustration forever. She collected and discovered plants that were new to botanical science at the time.

The Marvellous Marianne North: Adventurer, Botanist & Rulebreaker Lucy Panrucker

The story begins on October 24, 1830.

When the world was very different, there lived a lady who loved flowers, plants, trees and grasses, anything that grew. She lived in a large white house on the south coast of England in Hastings. With a lovely garden and greenhouses for growing rare plants.

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One day she went to visit Kew Gardens in London where there was a magnificent greenhouse. It was hot and muggy inside, just like a tropical rainforest.

It was brimming with beautiful plants from all over the world. Large exotic flowers in vibrant colours, small delicate flowers, and strange-looking flowers in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colours.

She adored this greenhouse and all the different plants in it so much that she visited it whenever she could.

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She also enjoyed painting, especially painting pictures of the flowers and plants she enjoyed so very much.

She also loved travelling, though it was a very different experience back then. There were no planes or cars only waggons, carriages, ocean liners, horses, and, of course, legs. There were a few trains, but not many.

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She decided one day that she wanted to go on an adventure. Not a small adventure. Oh No! A great big adventure to explore the world and find as many plants and animals as she possibly could. She wanted to see America’s massive redwood trees. She wanted to see banana trees and pineapples, koalas, and long slimy snakes.

She wanted to see plants that lured insects into their chambers before going... snap! Closed shut and ate them. Most importantly, she wanted to paint them and share them with people back in England so that they could see the wonderful things that grew in different parts of the world.

So, she packed her belongings and left. Exploring endless wilderness with so many new species entranced her. However, when her travelling companion’s scolding became unbearable, she went her own way. She didn’t care that travelling alone was frowned upon. From then on, she would always travel by herself.

“Hurray for liberty!” she wrote to a friend.

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She saw huge trumpet flowers, lilies, and fruits. She inhaled the sweet aromas of exotic blooms.

She saw monkeys, spiders, and plants like pots. “I was in a state of ecstasy, and hardly knew what to paint first,” she said.

Unfortunately, she encountered clear-cut forests, rampant invasive species, and water pollution.

She wasn’t afraid to criticise the British Empire for plundering colonial resources or American commercial loggers who seemed intent on cutting down every giant redwood in California.

Sadly, in many cases, her paintings are the only remaining record of rare species that are now extinct. But she was still amazed that the giant redwood tree stumps were large enough to behold! Magnificent!

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Travel wasn’t easy. Journeys by steamships often took weeks. Typhoons and shipwrecks were constant dangers.

Swamp and jungle travel by canoe meant watching out for water snakes and alligators not to mention everpresent leeches, but she did not complain. She was a true explorer and adventurer.

Nothing can stand in her way!

She spent years travelling around the world, tirelessly painting and bringing her pictures back to England. She often had to walk for miles and miles to get into the jungles and difficult places.

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Can you imagine? She travelled to all those countries by boat, carriage, train, horseback, or sometimes on donkeys, mules, or the backs of elephants. “Like a walking tree and so slow!” She later said about the elephant rides.

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She climbed cliffs and crossed rivers just to see the best of everything in its natural habitat, where she knew it, all belonged. And she did it all while wearing her long Victorian skirts and carrying many of her art supplies.

As her painting collection grew in her London flat, she began to wonder how she could share what she’d worked so hard to discover and illustrate. How could her artwork reach most people, both ordinary viewers and scientists?

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On August 11, 1879, while standing on an English railway platform, she had a brilliant idea! In a rush, she wrote a letter to her friend Sir Joseph Hooker, botanist and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, offering to donate her entire collection of paintings in exchange for the design and construction of a special gallery in a quiet part of the gardens. The Kew Gardens officials accepted, much to her delight. She hired an architect and began planning the construction of the Marianne North Gallery.

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The Marianne North Gallery opened on June 7, 1882, to record crowds and acclaim from London newspaper reviewers. There were 627 paintings on display, each of which was described in a printed catalogue.

Before the invention of colour photography or wildlife film documentaries, she discovered plants that no one had ever seen before in the Western world, and these plants are now named after her.

She left the hustle and bustle of London two years later for a small, isolated cottage in the rolling countryside of Gloucestershire.

She brought boxes of travel souvenirs with her, including stuffed Australian koala bear, platypus, shells, and crystals. She had the tennis court demolished as soon as she moved in to make way for a garden. During the long, dark winters, she huddled near the fireplace, working on her autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life. To escape the chill.

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After a long illness, she died on August 30, 1890, at the age of 59. She was laid to rest near her garden, which was filled with the plants and flowers she adored. She had never given up on her dream of accomplishing something extraordinary that no one expected. Her determination, courage, and curiosity remained with her to the end.

“Did I not paint? And wander and wonder at everything?”