Liriodendron Tulipifera, detail

Edmund Burke called Mrs Delany (née Mary Granville, 1700–1788) ‘the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages’.Quoted in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 129, citing what Dr Johnson heard Edmund Burke say. See also Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), V, 12. Already recognized in her own times, she continued to attract admirers after Lady Llanover brought out a complete ‘autobiography and correspondence’ in the...

~All the various strands of Mary Delany’s very rich life—gardening, botany, drawing, and paper cutting—came together in an extraordinary expression of knowledge, skill, and understanding in her hortus siccus, the ten albums of detailed and botanically accurate collages of plants that she created with cut and colored papers over a period of...