Following the North star

Victorian artist Marianne North braved jungle rapids, forests and mountains to capture the blowsy beauty of tropical plants on canvas. Carla Passino paints the life of a woman who defied conventions to forge her own path

THE door of the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens in west London opens and three visitors make their way in, sun hats askew, looking a little battered in their checked shirts and shorts. Their jaws drop. Whatever they were expecting when they sought respite from this summer’s lone day of muggy heat, it wasn’t the barrage of colours that explodes from every wall. Here are the blowsy flowers of a giant Amazon water lily, rich white with pollen or spent and pink after the insects’ harvest; there is a bilimbi, its trunk festooned with small purple flowers. Asian orchids burst pink and alluring from a tangle of tropical leaves. The fiery blooms of the Indian coral tree clamour for attention from an inner door’s lintel and, in a corner, a butterfly hovers over the plump bulb of Boophone toxicaria, brown under a pink cloud of petals.

Every inch of the gallery is covered in vivid botanical paintings, hung in a scheme of geometrical perfection conceived by the artist, Marianne North, herself, more than a century ago. When she bequeathed her collection to Kew, North also paid for the building to house it, but stipulated that her paintings would have to remain together in the way she had envisaged, in part, says gallery manager Victoria Kew, ‘because she didn’t want any interfering botanist coming to change it round. We think she even painted some fillers to make it all fit together’.