Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown read Botany at Oxford and then undertook research at Cambridge on the late and post-glacial vegetational history of Bodmin Moor. He then taught Biology in two independent schools for thirty years before taking early retirement to become a freelance botanical illustrator. Since 2002 he has worked, mainly in pen and ink, for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.  He has contributed plates to the Floras of Singapore, Iraq, Tropical East Africa and Flora Zambesiaca. He provided drawings of sixty taxa for the Botanical Magazine monograph ‘The Genus Betula’ and has occasionally contributed coloured plates for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.

He has painted and drawn plants and landscape since childhood, and has been awarded four Gold Medals by the Royal Horticultural Society for painted botanical illustrations.  In 2022 he was presented with the Jill Smythies Award for botanical illustration by the Linnean Society of London.  Apart from work commissioned by Kew, examples of his work are held by the Prince of Wales’s Highgrove Florilegium and Transylvania Florilegium, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, and Chelsea Physic Garden in London.