The Discipline of Work

One corner of one room of the building with Marianne North’s work at Kew Gardens.

Today is a day filled with lovely soft moisture that comes and goes, leaving its puddles of hope. It reminds me of the feel of another favorite place – London. And, what sometimes feels like a lifetime ago, I had the chance to spend some time in London’s Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.

However, one of the clearest memories of that visit was the building shown above, the story of artist Marianne North, and her work. Perhaps that visit made such an impression because it became one of those clarifying moments when an idea “gains legs.” Standing in the room pictured above, not just a bit overwhelmed by the immensity of the body of work, I saw proof of the confluence of two ideas – the power of giving physical shape to our individual voice and what that yields in our day to day work.    

Born in 1830, Marianne North lived during Britain’s Industrial Age, a paradigm shift that rivals the adaptations required of Americans today in surviving and thriving the rapidly changing technological realities or a shift in behavior like that mandated by a pandemic.  A talented musician, North couldn’t pursue an entertainment profession because it was “unseemly for women.” Instead, she pursued her love of painting, spending hours drawing the plants in Kew Gardens.

In the tradition for single women of the day, she cared for her ailing mother; and after her mother died, she cared for her father.  When he died in 1869, her life changed. Her father had taken her on many trips, and so, at ease with travel and wanting to be alone, she decided to travel solo and paint the flowers of the world.

She visited six continents, starting her travels in 1871 with a trip to Canada, the U.S., Jamaica, and Brazil, where she spent a year in the interior forest.  In 1875, she visited Tenerife before traveling to the U.S., Japan, Borneo, Java, and Ceylon for two years, with another year in India.  In 1880, she followed Charles Darwin’s suggestion and spent a year in Australia and New Zealand.  In 1883, she traveled to South Africa, and then spent two years in the Seychelles and Chile. 

Before photography became the accepted way to document visually, North recorded with scientific accuracy the world’s plants in her oils.  Her paintings are now recognized for their vivid colors and still used in studies by botanists today.  An amateur naturalist, she knew about plant identification, and four species were named after her.

Before she died in 1890, she built a two-story gallery at Kew to house 838 pieces of the over 1000 paintings she had completed, most in the final 14 years of her life.

But perhaps what I liked best about Marianne North and what made me smile was that she knew the power of food in connection with people learning. She wanted a place in her gallery for the tired Kew visitor to buy a spot of tea. She faced opposition to her idea when the Kew director refused her request on the grounds that Kew was a place for serious scholars, who “did not need tea.” 

However, North painted her way around the block. When the gallery opened in 1882, there were no refreshments available, but North had painted pictures of tea and coffee plants around the doorway entrances to welcome the public to the gallery!

To learn more about this remarkable woman, check out her story in A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North.

(Photo from Wikipedia Commons.)

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