A New Flowering: 1000 Years of Botanical Art At the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK, until 11 September 2005. http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ash/exhibitions/exh075.html

Botanical artists face the dual challenge of capturing the essence of each plant species artistically, yet representing the plants and their stages of growth with absolute scientific accuracy. The veracity of great botanical art derives from artists' skill at producing work that both records plant species in technical detail and heightens viewers' perception of the natural world.

Setting the scene: the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig is the backdrop to Rory McEwen's painting of monk's hood. Credit: SHIRLEY SHERWOOD COLLECTION

The exhibition A New Flowering is a clever juxtaposition of examples of contemporary botanical art, selected from a private collection assembled since 1990, with rarely exhibited works from the past millennium, chosen from the collections of the Ashmolean Museum and several Oxford colleges. It highlights both the novelty of current practice in botanical art and its continuity with the past.

Historic works on show include eleventh-century herbals, which name and describe plants and list their properties and uses; fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, whose borders are decorated with flowers; sixteenth-century printed books, illustrated with woodcuts; seventeenth-century books that are illustrated with engravings; and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works, notably some particularly sumptuous volumes that depict freshly discovered plant species. Throughout, contemporary botanical images are displayed alongside related earlier works.

Two important twentieth-century botanical artists whose works are included in the exhibition expanded their influence beyond the world's herbaria into environmental conservation and modern art, respectively. English artist Margaret Mee moved to Brazil in the 1950s, where she made 15 expeditions into the Amazon rainforest and became one of the first conservationists to raise concerns over its exploitation. And Scottish artist Rory McEwen, for whom the placement of flowers, vegetables and leaves in his pictures was as important as the plants themselves, propelled botanical art into modern art galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His eerie 1977 watercolour of an unfolding young shoot of monk's hood (Aconitum) with a ghostly profile of the Scottish island Ailsa Craig in the background, shown on the opposite page, is particularly striking.