Stella Ross-Craig (1906–2006)

Stella Ross-Craig was born in Aldershot, England, to Scottish parents. She developed an interest in plants at a young age. She studied both art and botany, attending the Thanet School of Art in Margate and taking drawing classes at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London. In 1929, she obtained a position at the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She began to contribute botanical illustrations to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and her reputation as a botanical artist grew to become unrivalled in her field. She was particularly renowned for her drawings and studies of flora native to Britain, the culmination of which was her series Drawings of British Plants. The first of these inexpensive paperbacks was published in 1948; they eventually expanded to a 30-part series that was published in full book in 1973. The book included more than 1,000 illustrations of every plant native to the British Isles. In 1999, Ross-Craig became the sixth person to receive the Kew International Medal. She was named a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1948 and was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 2002. She was married to a fellow botanist, her colleague Joseph Robert Sealy.