Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

A native of North Wales, Grierson served in World War II as an aerial photography interpreter. Later she worked for a cartographical firm, did freelance plant illustration and studied under John Nash, noted painter and illustrator. From 1960 to 1972 she was staff artist at Kew, which has perhaps the most famous collection of living plant specimens in the world. She was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1967, the same year in which she was commissioned to prepare designs of British flora for a series of British postage stamps. She spent two seasons in Israel and the Sinai, painting protected plants of that region for publication by the Israeli Nature Reserves Authority, and a season in Holland to do watercolor drawings for a book on the background and history of the tulip. The exhibition also included calendar illustrations commissioned for the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the National Trust of Great Britain, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and the World Wildlife Fund. Grierson had been awarded three gold medals for artwork exhibited in Royal Horticultural Society shows. Her work was displayed in London by the Royal Society, the Linnean Society and the British Museum of Natural History; at the International Exhibition of Botanical Art in South Africa and the Frans Hals Museum in Holland; and in Tel-Aviv, Wales and Scotland. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition.