Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

Patricia Margaret Calhoun Watson was born in London in 1931, an only child, to Patrick and Margaret Calhoun Watson, who had been born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Patricia Watson studied history and philosophy at St. Andrew's University in Scotland and after graduating in 1955 returned to London, where she discovered a love of, and talent for, painting flowers. She met George Robinson, curator of the University Botanic Garden at Oxford, while meandering through the garden, and upon hearing of her interest in botanical art, he allowed her to paint flowers in his office for six months. Rennie recalls that period as "one of the happiest and most peaceful times of my life" (pers. comm., 2023), and she spent her days befriending the gardeners and foremen, wandering through the quiet garden, discovering plants she had never seen and then painting them in Robinson's office. Between 1956 and 1958, Rennie studied botanical art at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Despite making considerable progress in her artistic skill, Rennie found the environment to be less hospitable than that of Oxford, feeling that she was met with more criticism than encouragement from a predominantly male establishment, and where she was not able to progress in her career as a botanical illustrator. She left to pursue art on her own terms, exhibiting two paintings in the Royal Academy of Art's summer exhibition that year. While she exhibited work with the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Horticultural Society, where she received a silver grenfell medal in 1966, and our own Contemporary Botanical Art and Illustration (1st International) in 1964, for Rennie the 1960s were primarily a time of focusing on her young family. She married James Douglas Rennie in 1962 and had her first child, a son, in 1963, followed in 1967 by her second, a daughter.

Despite deciding not to pursue a career as a botanical artist, Rennie never stopped creating artwork on her own. She has worked in a variety of mediums over the decades, including continued work with botanical subjects on notecards and ceramic tiles, which she sold through galleries. Of her work with ceramics, Rennie states that she "found clay a relaxing and freeing medium to liberate my creativity from the rigid scientific discipline at Kew" (pers. comm., 2023). Additionally, she has focused much of her creative energy on writing. An avid diarist since her childhood, as an adult she studied different types of writing, including memoir and poetry, and was able to combine her love of storytelling with her own illustrations in several self-published books. Rennie has written and published four autobiographical books and four collections of poetry, all to be donated to Bishopsgate Institute in London, where her lifetime of diaries already resides as part of their Great Diary Project.

Thumbnails of the Rennie images have been added to the Catalogue of the Botanical Art Collection at the Hunt Institute database. To locate these images in the database, search on the artist's last name.

Other Resources

For information about portraits of and biographical citations for the subject, see the Hunt Institute Archives Register of Botanical Biography and Iconography database.