It’s easy to imagine contemporary botanical artists standing to attention,
their hair brushed and shoes polished, when Dr Shirley Sherwood decides to
take a look at their work. As the owner of more than 700 paintings, she is
the world’s leading collector of the genre (she leaves pre-20th-century art
to others) and has done more than anyone else to elevate the status of those
who painstakingly — and often beautifully — record our plants in minute
detail.
“I could be modest and say no, but that just isn’t true,” says Sherwood, 76,
as we inspect works at Hinton Manor — her country pile near Faringdon,
Oxfordshire — by the likes of Rory McEwen, a Scottish artist painting on
vellum; Margaret Mee, a British artist who was one of the first to bring the
plight of the Brazilian rainforests to the world’s attention in the 1950s;
and Paul Jones, from Australia, whose works are also collected by the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Original
paintings can fetch up to £25,000.
The earliest in the collection is dated 1947, though most have been painted in
the past 15 years, many of them commissioned by Sherwood. “I have actually
changed the whole concept,” she says. “It is very interesting that one
person can do this. I never intended to, it wasn’t my plan at all.”
Sherwood has had a lifelong passion for plants. She read botany at Oxford in
the 1950s, before moving into pharmacological research. She has long admired
botanical art and considered taking it up herself before concluding it would
take her too long to reach a high enough standard. So she decided to collect
instead. Her first purchase, in 1990, was a depiction of a pink orchid by
Pandora Sellars, a leading contemporary artist, which she bought for £3,330.
“There’s some wonderful stuff out there,” she says. “It is vastly underrated.
I have works by 241 artists from all around the world, including China,
Japan, Australia, South Africa and South America — it goes on.”
About 100 of them are in the house; the rest are in a studio in her five-acre
garden. At present, however, there are a few gaps: more than 130 pictures are
hanging in an exhibition, The Art of Plant Evolution, in the gallery that
bears her name at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
The family gave a generous donation towards the gallery, which opened last
year. Sherwood’s American husband, James, also 76, founded the shipping
company Sea Containers, as well as the Orient-Express hotel and train group,
from which he stepped down as chairman in 2007. He’s not in evidence when I
visit the eight-bedroom house, bought more than 30 years ago, where they
live when not in their Kensington home or visiting the group’s 33 hotels
around the world.
Parts of the house were built in the 15th century, though later additions are
Georgian and Victorian. Henry Marten, one of those who signed the death warrant
of Charles I, lived there, and Oliver Cromwell is alleged to have stayed
during the civil war.
If you were painting a portrait of the archetypal elegant English country
house, complete with a gravel drive that crunches satisfactorily when you
walk or drive on it, Hinton Manor would fit the bill. Beside the remnant of
a moat mentioned in the Domesday Book (now a long, thin lake) stand three
huge cedars of Lebanon that are at least 200 years old, giving the place a
dignified sense of permanence. Sherwood has planted a couple more to take
the garden, which is not open to the public, into the next century or two.
Other trees in the parkland beyond were not so hardy. “When we came here,
Dutch elm disease had devastated the place. It was like spillikins,” she
says. Now, there are new stands of chestnut, beech, birch, lime and oak,
which also block the wind coming across the fields.
Although there is a colourful herbaceous border to the side of the house, and
little pockets of surprise — a cottage garden area by the studio, next to a
sunny patch planted with desert exotics — much of the garden is devoted to
trees and shrubs, many of them unusual. For instance, a swamp cypress stands
on the slope below the house, to complement the equine statue by John Mills,
while in the former walled garden she has planted an avenue of Ginkgo
biloba, one of the world’s oldest living tree species, which is looking a
bit bedraggled. “It doesn’t really work, but I will get it right one day.”
Unlike her husband, who is uninterested in matters horticultural (“It is a
disappointment to me; Americans are not brought up in the tradition of
gardening”), Sherwood is keen on cultivating her plot and has done much to
restore it, as well as planting new areas, including a dell garden by the
swimming pool. “This was just a hollow with a whole lot of dead elms in it.
There wasn’t a single flowering plant in it.”
