Herbarium Specimen Painting at Kew Gardens "I first came here in 2001 as an MA student," says Pedder-Smith. I was so inspired, I thought, I want to be here forever. A down-to-earth 36 year-old, Pedder-Smith is not the stereotypical botanical illustrator. She acquired some of her earliest specimens by sawing branches off neighbours" shrubs when she was a student. I don't suppose anyone noticed. The painting and drawing of plants has always been central to the Herbarium's activities, and remains so even in our age of digital imaging. Pedder-Smith is one of a new generation of botanical illustrators who are revivifying the area that exists between art and science, but isn't quite accepted as either. Brought up in East Anglia, Pedder-Smith did a degree at Leeds Metropolitan University - one of the few illustration courses that allowed students to concentrate on natural history. "It was seen as a dead area," she says. Moving to London, she became a regular visitor to the Herbarium, establishing a distinctive visual style that eschewed the insipid tones of conventional botanical illustration in favour of darker, more vivid colours. Rather than green-leafed living samples, she works always from dried specimens, whose desiccated, sculptural qualities she finds "particularly beautiful." Wanting to take on an ambitious and scientifically demanding project for a PhD at the Royal College of Art designed to bring together art and science, she decided to tackle all the 506 known flowering plant families in one painting, establishing their distinguishing characteristics with the Herbarium botanists - a task that would have floored most people. "I have got an obsessive temperament," she concedes. For me there was a thrill to starting a massive project, and a sense of security in knowing what I'd be doing for years. Starting with amborella, supposedly the oldest and most "primitive" plant family, and working forward according to the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group II (one of the classification systems used in the Herbarium), brought her into step with one of the establishment's essential purposes. "One upon a time there was a progenitor of all plants," says Dr Lewis. They all started somewhere, and we're trying to build a picture of how that happened in a catalogued, scientific way - looking back millions of years into deep geological time. Originally we looked at plants morphologically, in terms of their shape and appearance. A spiny plant, for example, must be related to other spiny plants. But with the development of molecular biology over the past 30 years, we're looking at much deeper structures. A plant in the desert and a plant on a Swiss mountainside that look nothing like each other may be closely related. The more information we have, and the more that information forms the same patterns, the closer we are to the reality of the tree of life. Along the painting's kaleidoscopic sweep are a whole range of quirky plant samples: a passionflower leaf collected by Darwin in the Galapagos Islands; a piece of quinine-producing cinchona bark brought from the Amazon by Richard Spruce, a 19th-century Yorkshireman who personally tested the hallucinogenic properties of all the plants he collected; a fragment of olive branch from Tutankhamun's tomb; and a cannabis leaf found on a council refuse tip in the Seventies. But, for all the project's painstaking accuracy, the layout and composition were unplanned. "To select and draw out 700 specimens in advance would have been mind-numbingly boring," says Pedder-Smith. Instead, she added the specimens one by one in pencil and watercolour, consulting the scientists but trusting her instincts in selecting striking examples. Since completing the painting, Pedder-Smith's life has taken a turbulent turn. She had her first baby last year, but her mother, a teacher who inspired her love of the natural world, died in February, without seeing the finished work. Now she has the opportunity to sell the painting and see some reward for her labour. Yet for her, interacting with the Herbarium and its specimens was payment in itself. Picking them up, touching them, thinking about them and painting them, you feel a link to the person who chose and collected them that is more meaningful than just painting any old plant. And I've been lucky enough to be able to do that. The Pressed Plant - Rachel Pedder-Smith's Herbarium Specimen Painting is at The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens, from March 31-May 7. Admission free with entry to the gardens (kew.org)