In response to an overwhelming interest in the first publication of limited edition prints, The Petersburg Garden Club is releasing four new watercolor reproductions from the noted Lee Park Wildflower Collection. The portfolio of 500 limited edition prints includes: Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida L.; Slender Blue Flag, Iris prismatica Pursh ex Ker-Gawl.; Laurel- Magnolia or Sweet Bay, Magnolia virginiana L.; and Larger Yellow Lady’s-Slipper; Cypripedium parviflorum Salisb.

In cooperation with a WPA project, the Horticulture Committee of The Petersburg Garden Club, under the direction of Mary Donald Claiborne Holden, pressed and dried plant specimens from Lee Park. She hired Bessie Niemeyer Marshall, a local artist, to illustrate in watercolor over 200 of these wildflowers. This endeavor evolved into the herbarium project in 1935. As a result, the club was awarded the prestigious Garden Club of Virginia Massie Medal in 1948. In 1998, with the publication of With Paintbrush and Shovel—a text of these events with 238 of the botanical illustrations—the club received the Garden Club of Virginia Common Wealth Award. The book is now in its second printing.

Lee Park Sanctuary’s twenty-five acres is a natural, wooded area bordering Willcox Lake. There the women of the project, under Holden’s direction, developed ten miles of paths through the rugged contours of hills, ravines, and swamps. Petersburg is noted as an excellent location for the development of such a herbarium. Unique to the park area is a geological setting, a natural joining of the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain creating a fertile site and a rich botanical meeting ground for rare plant species.

Eighty of the original watercolors have been framed and placed on exhibit in various museums and conservatories in Virginia and North Carolina, including the American Horticultural Society Museum in Alexandria, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Norfolk Botanical Garden in Norfolk, The Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham, and the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville.

Bessie Niemeyer Marshall was an accomplished Virginia botanical artist who received little recognition during her lifetime but whose remarkable talents have come to light through the 238 exquisite watercolors of the Lee Park Herbarium Collection. “Mrs. Marshall’s work is clearly superb,” wrote Amy Meyers, curator of the Huntington Library in California. “She stands out as a twentieth-century master of botanical illustration.”

Born on December 25, 1884, in Portsmouth, Virginia, Sarah Elizabeth Niemeyer grew up to become the wife of Myron Marshall, an Episcopal minister, and the mother of nine children. A soft-spoken woman known for her sense of humor, unflappable attitude, and flair as a storyteller, Bessie Marshall applied her artistic talents during her child-rearing years to ambitious craft and sewing projects. Her hand-painted trays were sold across the country, and her decoratively painted lampshades and china earned her several local commissions. She was an expert seamstress who kept her family well-clothed, even when finances were tight, and who sewed wardrobes for her daughter’s dolls that matched their own clothes.

In 1937, the Marshall family moved to Petersburg, Virginia, where Myron had accepted a temporary rectorship. Here Bessie met Donald Holden, who commissioned her to paint the Lee Park flora. Marshall was the ideal choice. An avid horticulturist whose garden had once been photographed for a seed catalogue, she had a deep knowledge of plants and a special affection for wildflowers. “They are like fairies,” she once said in a newspaper interview. “You come upon one in the woods one day, and you go back later to paint it, and it has vanished.” She had already demonstrated her skill as a botanical artist in a series of paintings that had won praise from admirers as diverse as the president of William and Mary College and members of The Petersburg Garden Club. She welcomed the WPA commission because her husband had become disabled with Parkinson’s disease and was about to retire, and the family was concerned about making ends meet.

Marshall painted most of the Lee Park wildflowers at a green square table on the side porch of her modest Petersburg home. Working from live specimens set in a jug of water, she mixed her colors carefully on a cracked china saucer that served as her palette. Her notebook shows that she spent at least 1,674 hours on the WPA commission.

Although she had no formal art training, Marshall possessed a keen eye and steady hand with which she expertly captured the individual character of each plant. She excelled at rendering a plant’s identifying details, such as the leathery leaves of the laurel-magnolia and the single red seed hanging by a silky thread from its compound fruit, or the veins popping out from the undersides of leaves in several paintings. She applied color carefully, capturing the subtle shades of lavender-blue and yellow in the flower of the slender blue flag. Yet within the exacting discipline of botanical illustration, Marshall found room for expression, as in her dramatic diagonal composition of the flowering dogwood.

After completing the Lee Park paintings in 1940, Marshall sought to gain wider recognition as an artist. A National Geographic editor expressed interest in hiring her to illustrate a volume of eastern U.S. flora, but no commission materialized. Her portfolio attracted attention and compliments from representatives of the Macmillan publishing company, the National Wildlife Federation, and the president of the University of Virginia, but nothing came of these conversations either. Marshall came close to being hired by Encyclopedia Britannica to do wildflower illustrations for its junior edition, but the company eventually decided that photographs would be more cost effective.

Although national recognition eluded her, Marshall remained optimistic. She continued to paint and became a favorite speaker at garden clubs. In 1946, after the death of both her husband and a beloved grandson, she returned to Portsmouth. Marshall died of a stroke at age seventy-five, on February 14, 1960. She had been outside in the snow the day before to check on her rose bushes.