Florilegium will showcase contemporary botanical paintings from the Florilegium Society in the 200th anniversary year of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and will explore the botanical and horticultural development of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and its links with domestic gardens and the public landscapes of NSW between the years 1816 – 2016. 

Colleen Morris is a heritage consultant and former National Chair of the Australian Garden History Society and is the curator of Florilegium: Sydney’s Painted Garden.  Colleen has had considerable professional experience with Sydney Living Museums and the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney including its library and archives collection, as well as with numerous significant gardens and landscapes in NSW.

Artist and President of The Florilegium Society at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, Beverly Allen has been a professional botanical artist since 1998 and a teacher of the subject since 2004. Her paintings are published in The Highgrove Florilegium for the Prince of Wales’ Charitable Trust and are in the collections of the Botanic Gardens Trust Sydney, the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Hunt Institute in Pittsburgh, the Isaac and Alisa Sutton Collection and the Shirley Sherwood Collection.  She was awarded a Gold Medal at the Royal Horticultural Society Show in London in 2007, the inaugural Gold Medal 2011 and the Silver Medal 2014 for Botanical Art at the New York Botanicc Gardens.