I like to think there is a place for both the art-form and the scientific illustration, the lines are blurred now between the two. It is possible to have information and aesthetic values in both types of artwork. The only different between the two is how they are to be used.

I would say watercolour and acrylic are the top two ways to depict plants because of the vivid colours and the amount of detail you can achieve, but as always there are exceptions. There are those plants who benefit from a colour pencil approach , or oils or graphite. Depends on the amount of detail, texture of the plant, size etc. For me I let the plants dictate the best way they should be drawn rather than try and contain them in all the same format. I also think for the majority of artists their skill with a particular medium will be the deciding factor. How good or comfortable they are with that medium and how well they can manipulate it to depict their subject will be the end choice.

To develop the theme then, it can be helpful to think of painting in terms of a language; not only do the words and phrases that we paint have to make sense to us and our plant material, they also have to be read and understood by our audience. The language can then grow (words and phrases are added) not when people notice the real world more accurately, but when artists experiment with adjusting previous words or phrases that suggest perhaps a more life-like interpretation of the painting or a more contemporary image of a plant. Our audience must still be able to understand the image and so our new words should not be too different from the existing ones. We need to take our audience with us and not confuse and bewilder them.

We can therefore make the decision to paint and draw in a slightly different way (to use different painting words or phrases) if our audience is going to be botanists, or the general public, or fine art collectors because each of these groups will read the painting in a different way because of their background and what they know.

Similarly people knowledgeable about oriental culture may be more comfortable relating to a single elegant flower with a lot of space around it because of the flower painting and flower arranging traditions there than someone from a western culture who likes to see a bunch of flowers in a vase.

One artistic device that I use in some paintings is making parts of the plant close to and far away appear out of focus. This is something we understand because culturally we are exposed to so many photographic images nowadays, but I don’t think it would have been understandable to the general public three or four hundred years ago without knowledge of how a lens works.