Drawing grasses

Spend the day with botanical illustrator Lizzie Harper, creating pen and ink or pencil line drawings of beautiful, and often overlooked, grasses. Lizzie will be joined by Dr Raphaella Hull, Acting Head of Learning at CUBG, to learn more about the structure and variety of grasses, showcasing examples in the Botanic Garden.

Suitable for all abilities

Lizzie Harper is a free-lance natural history and botanical illustrator who has been teaching botanical illustration at the Garden for the past decade.  She specialises in pencil techniques, composition, fruits, composite flowers, pen and ink techniques and leaf painting masterclasses. She’s the illustrator of “The Hedgerow Handbook” and “Foraging with Kids, and her work is in “The Bumper Book of Nature” and “HarperCollins Flower Guide”.  Lizzie worked on flower identification charts for Field Studies Council, and illustrations for the Welsh Botanic Gardens. She works in her garden studio in Hay on Wye where she lives happily with a long-suffering husband and two lively children.

Dr Raphaella Hull teaches and writes about plants as Acting Head of Learning at the Botanic Garden. She oversees the activity of the Learning Team and develops and delivers the Garden’s Further and Higher Education programme. Before this, she completed a PhD on how plants perceive mycorrhizal fungi in soil, with an interest in the evolution of this relationship and its significance in grassland ecosystems.