Marjorie Blamey obituary

Marjorie Blamey, who has died aged 101, was Britain’s most prolific illustrator of wild flowers. She contributed all the colour illustrations, amounting to many thousands of paintings, for a succession of distinguished field guides, beginning with Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe in 1974.

It was followed by Alpine Flowers (1979), Mediterranean Wild Flowers (1993) and Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland (2003). The large-format Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (1989), written with her close friend Christopher Grey-Wilson (and revised in 2003 as Cassell’s Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe), was her favourite. It was selected as book of the year by Natural World magazine.

Her favourite flower, one she painted many times, was the Cornish primrose: “It’s such a lovely simple flower. I am not fond of the great big exotic things. They don’t thrill me like wild flowers do.”

Marjorie’s watercolour illustrations opened people’s eyes to the beauty of wild flowers at home and throughout Europe, including the Mediterranean islands. Her pictures captured the essence of a plant in a way that photography rarely can, and made identification much easier than was previously the case. Her field guides became the mainstay of green tours throughout Europe. Indeed, without them, European wild flowers might well have remained the province of a handful of dedicated botanists.

Her output was extraordinary, all the more so for her lack of formal botanical training. Marjorie and her husband Philip travelled in a motor caravan that doubled as her studio. She painted flowers they had gathered during the day and preserved in boxes lined with damp paper to keep them fresh. She began painting as soon as it was light, sometimes as early as 4am, and usually finished a dozen paintings before lunch.

A network of botanists from across Europe would also send her specimens packed in special aluminium boxes. At home her fridge – and sometimes the bath, too – was often packed with plants waiting to be painted. She needed to work quickly, for, as she pointed out, “When you have 500 flowers you have to do 20 a day before they wilt. Luckily both speed and accuracy come naturally to me.”

Towards the end of her career, Marjorie owned a library of 10,000 flower paintings from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and could call up almost any wild flower in Europe from stock. No other botanical illustrator has come close to her output. She won several gold medals for her work from the Royal Horticultural Society and the Alpine Garden Society, and in 2007 was appointed MBE.

She was born to British parents in Talawakelle, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her father, Arthur Day, worked as a doctor. Her mother, Janette Newton-Baker, was a nurse. The family returned to the UK in 1921 and settled in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. Marjorie and her brother, Dick, enjoyed the outdoor life, developing an early love of nature.

Marjorie’s gift for drawing and painting was accompanied by a talent for theatricals and, after the family’s move to Epsom, Surrey, in 1929, she won a place at a local acting school, attending once a week while sharing a governess for the rest of her schooling. In 1934 she won a scholarship to attend Rada and took part in several films at the Elstree Studios. For a while she also took up photography, winning competitions and exhibiting at the London Salon of Photography.

Her acting career came to an abrupt halt at the outbreak of the second world war, when she joined the Ambulance Brigade and trained as a nurse. She met her future husband, Philip Blamey, then serving as a junior officer in the Staffordshire Regiment, while tobogganing at midnight on the Epsom Downs. They married in August 1941.

After the war the couple trained to be a “cowman and wife”. Together with their three children (a fourth was born in 1953), they moved to Cornwall, where they ran a dairy farm near Liskeard. It was not until she was in her late 40s that Marjorie rediscovered her childhood love of flower painting. A friend spotted her pictures of local wild flowers and arranged for them to be displayed at the county flower show. They were seen by the horticulturalist Neil Treseder, who persuaded her to illustrate his book on magnolias.

That in turn led to the commission that changed her life: an invitation from Collins to illustrate the new field guide to wild flowers, for which she teamed up with the naturalist Richard Fitter. The work took her two years to complete, but the book, published in 1974, became a bestseller and was translated into 14 European languages. “My husband and I pinched ourselves,”recalled Marjorie. “It was not planned. It just fell into our lap.”

At that point Marjorie had never been abroad. In the following years she took up botanical illustration full-time, selling the farm to concentrate on her painting while Philip organised her growing library of pictures. In 1978 the BBC filmed a documentary about their lives for The World About Us series called Wild Flower Safari. Travelling and painting for a succession of books followed, either in collaboration with Fitter and his son Alastair, or with her botanical mentor, Grey-Wilson. She completed her last field guide, Wild flowers of Britain and Ireland, at the age of 85.

Marjorie herself wrote a series of books on flower painting, and also illustrated nature books for the children’s author David Stephen. Between tours, she taught watercolour painting, gave talks and slide shows, and organised exhibitions of her work. She also enjoyed sailing the family’s boat, the Sapphire, on the St Germans river.

Marjorie was modest about her gifts. But when asked about her key strengths as a botanical artist, she said: “I make flowers look alive, not like pressed dead things.”

Philip died in 2014. She is survived by their two sons and two daughters.

• Marjorie Netta Blamey, botanical illustrator, born 13 March 1918; died 8 September 2019