Brush off that snow and warm up to a brush of vibrant colour instead.

The Plantasia Collection is an ongoing project that highlights botanical art, and showcases it in a series of watercolour paintings by Calgary artist L.C. Cariou.

Kew’s Princess of Wales Conservatory (2019) was one where my ambition clearly got away from me. I was enchanted with this temperate house at Kew Garden’s, brimming with a variety plants, home to plants from 10 different climate zones! This painting centres on the wet tropical zone of the conservatory, home of the iconic Victoria amazonica waterlily’s, I believe my ambition grew to match the 2.8 meters of them. Nevertheless I made my way slowly and surely through the painting and after many painstaking hours I finally finished it. After-which I boasted for months that it was my masterpiece. 

At the beginning of the month I finished my series of British Horticulture paintings! For now! There will probably be a part 2 someday, but for now I am moving onto another topic! But I wanted to do a bit of a recap of the whole series as a wrap up, and go into some of the details about the paintings individually and what it was like painting them.

My visit to Kew Gardens in June 2018 provided me with most of the images for my series of paintings which I am near to finishing. This was not intentional however in the nearly 2000 photographs of gardens I took on that trip it appears that Kew is extremely photogenic!