Mrs Delany’s collages and the plants that nearly vanished

Mary Delany began her paper garden in 1773, at the age of seventy-two. She cut, coloured and pasted printed paper into botanical forms, mounting the finished plants on canvas. The result was both an ambitious body of art and an unusually personal account of the world she knew.

Her collages have come to be read as a record of extinct or rare plants. Their importance lies in the way they preserve appearances, names and memories of flora that may no longer survive in the same form. Molly Peacock explores that legacy in The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, tracing the making of the series and its place in Delany’s remarkable late life.

Delany’s art of botanical remembrance

Delany’s method was painstaking. She might take a flower from a botanical engraving, adapt its colour by hand and combine it with a leaf observed elsewhere. Paper was attached to canvas with a gum-based adhesive, and the plants were built up in layers. Her surviving group of eighteen works is often called the Paper Garden, though each collage functions as both specimen and composition.

That hybrid process shaped what we can learn. A collage may preserve the silhouette and patterning of a plant that has become extremely uncommon, yet it remains an interpretation shaped by print, pigment, memory and artistic judgement. It does not offer the untouched surface of a living specimen. Instead, it records the route by which that plant entered European science and society.

Further information about Peacock’s research, media and related material is available through the official project website. The book treats the garden as a late-life creative act, not simply a set of attractive botanical artefacts.

A record with beautiful complications

Some plants represented by Delany have since disappeared, while others remain scarce or difficult to cultivate. Their presence in the collages creates a visual baseline: we can see how these species were understood before landscapes, collections and populations changed. For vanished flora, that evidence is precious because photographs, paintings and dried samples cannot always supply the same combination of detail and human attention.

The record is complicated. Delany sometimes worked from published images and sometimes from direct observation. She could alter scale, omit a diagnostic feature or complete an incomplete form. Colour also shifted between a printed source and her paper. A collage is therefore not automatically a botanically exact portrait, and the differences from a herbarium sheet are revealing rather than merely troublesome.

Yet its value does not depend on perfect taxonomic accuracy. The collages reveal the international circulation of botanical knowledge, the tastes of collectors and the changing status of plants in the eighteenth century. They show people caring about unfamiliar species at a moment when many were already under pressure. In that sense, each cut edge carries both botanical evidence and the history of attention.

Why the collages matter now

A major group of the works is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where digital images allow visitors to inspect their extraordinary detail. This access matters. A remote flower form can be enlarged, compared with surviving plants and read alongside herbarium descriptions. Conservation science depends on such records, while cultural history can examine how women made knowledge through skill, patience and invention.

Australian readers can consult PlantNET New South Wales and state herbarium catalogues when tracing native species, then use the bookshop finder to look for a copy of Peacock’s book. The comparison need not suggest that Delany’s subjects belonged here; it can reveal how different environments produce different approaches to collecting and preserving plants.

An Australian reading of vanished plants

The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra offer useful reference points because living collections, historic records and public interpretation sit close together. Delany’s paper specimens can be considered beside Australian natives that survive only in protected habitats, allowing viewers to ask what a rare plant looks like when its future is uncertain.

Local habits make the comparison familiar. Melbourne’s Flemington Flower Market offers a contemporary view of flowers as commodities and celebration, while many Australian households tend balconies, backyards or small suburban plots, and gardening clubs often exchange seeds or knowledge. Delany’s painstaking indoor work speaks to a different economy of plants, but it shares the practical pleasure of growing, noticing and sharing them.

Australian law adds a practical frame. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 governs listed threatened species, ecosystems and associated processes, while the Biosecurity Act 2015 helps manage risks associated with moving plant material into the country. Any reader handling seeds, herbarium material or live plants should check current federal, state and territory requirements rather than assume that a beautiful specimen is freely portable.

What the paper garden preserves

Seen closely, each collage works on two levels: as evidence about a plant and as evidence about the person who remembered it.

What the garden records

• The visible form of uncommon plants, including petals, leaves and growth patterns that a brief encounter might miss.
• How unfamiliar species were pictured, named and discussed in eighteenth-century Europe.
• The networks of artists, gardeners, correspondents and printed sources behind botanical knowledge.

What it cannot prove

• That every detail matches one living plant examined at the same moment.
• That its scale, colour or missing structures reproduce natural growth exactly.
• That it can replace a verified herbarium specimen or modern identification.

These limits make the collages a nuanced archive rather than a transparent record. Their value grows from the tension between visual truth and artistic construction. Delany preserved not only the look of plants, but the human encounters from which knowledge of them emerged.

Bringing the garden into public life

The Paper Garden lends itself to public discussion because it moves between art history, botany, book history and biography. Peacock’s account gives readers a clear way into the making of each collage and into Delany’s social world. It also corrects the temptation to treat the late work as a decorative diversion.

Current appearances and speaking opportunities are listed on the readings and events page. Online talks, filmed conversations and book-group visits can reach Australian audiences without requiring a journey to London, while garden clubs and university departments can adapt the subject for local programmes.

For a hands-on response, invite participants to compare a collage with a pressed leaf, study how paper and colour affect recognition, and discuss whether an artistic image should count as conservation evidence. The aim is not to turn Delany into a botanical authority, but to see how different kinds of witnesses can support one another.

Let the paper garden keep growing

Delany’s achievement lies in making preservation feel alive. The collages do not arrest plants behind glass; they reveal the linked acts of seeing, cutting, colouring and remembering that once kept them in view. Their afterlife continues through Peacock’s book, exhibitions, readings and the readers who compare them with the flora now under threat.

Read The Paper Garden, share it with a gardener, artist or history reader, and bring one of Delany’s plant stories to a local book club, garden gathering or herbarium event. That simple act carries a vanished botanical record into a new place and gives the paper garden a further life.