Shirley Sherwood

"Hungarian minstrels boarded the train at , played vigorously for more than two hours and finished with the ', with the chef singing a vociferous solo. The passengers were received by at his new . managed to arrange an exclusive interview with him, which he glowingly recounted in '. After the euphoria of the inaugural trip the settled into a regular routine."

"A next big step forward was the building of the Shirley Sherwood Gallery by my family. It opened in the in 2008, and stands next to the Marianne North Gallery. Since then there have been over 50 exhibitions, always with some contributions from my collection and Kew's archives. I had been commissioning and acquiring paintings since 1990 and by 2018 had more than than a thousand works from artists working all over the world. Another milestone was that by 2018 we counted over one million visitors to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. It has become the central focus of botanical art in the world today and the footfall has increased dramatically."

"The spectacular works in this book, all exemplars from Dr Shirley Sherwood's incomparable collection of contemporary botanical art, highlight an artistic practice that infuses accuracy with artistry, and deep love of plants, to create new works that rank with the greatest of the eighteenth and nineteenth century."