The Lost Art of Looking: How Botanical Art and Herbal Medicine Have Always Been Important Women’s Work

Why reclaiming both might be exactly what we need right now

There is something that deeply connects us to the awe and wonder of looking closely at a plant.

I mean, not just glancing or scrolling past a beautiful image of one. But really looking at the curve of a leaf, the architecture of a stem, the way light moves through a petal. It is an act of creative attention that our ancestors understood instinctively, and one that modern life has almost entirely erased.

There is something that deeply connects us to the awe and wonder of looking closely at a plant.

I mean, not just glancing or scrolling past a beautiful image of one. But really looking at the curve of a leaf, the architecture of a stem, the way light moves through a petal. It is an act of creative attention that our ancestors understood instinctively, and one that modern life has almost entirely erased.

For thousands of years, women looked at plants and they remembered what they saw. They knew which herb would ease a fever, which root would calm an anxious mind, which flower would bring on sleep. They passed this knowledge between themselves through families and communities, healer to apprentice made possible through observation, foraging and story. It was long ago and never written down as formally documentation; however, it was simply created, known, and lived.

This was women’s medicine. And for a very long time, it was everything.

Wise Women and Their Gardens

Women of every culture were healers long before pharmaceutical companies and university-trained physicians. From diverse Chinese herbal traditions to indigenous botanical knowledge passed through generations, from the apothecary gardens of medieval Europe to the kitchen remedies of early modern Britain, women were the keepers of nature’s medicine cabinet.

They were mostly called wise women. Sometimes herbalists. Often their knowledge and creativity so threatening to the establishment they were called witches.

The Museum of Cambridge documents that this creative and cultural significance has been largely lost to us today. The healing knowledge of women, accumulated over centuries of careful observation and practice, was systematically undermined, dismissed and eventually erased as male-dominated institutions of science and medicine took hold.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that the medical traditions women had maintained for centuries were reframed through the lens of formal science. And yet even here, women were somewhat present, quiet and essential rendering the drawings and paintings what the men were busy naming.

Leonardo and the Silencing of Women’s Hands

When Leonardo da Vinci drew plants, his botanical illustrations where studies of grasses, flowers, herbs. They are among the most breathtaking in the history of art, rendered with a precision that feels almost devotional. Most scholars believe he drew them as studies for his paintings rather than for scientific or healing purposes. But they point to something important: the act of drawing a plant has always been understood as an act of understanding it.

With the invention of the printing press, botanical illustration became a formal discipline. Herbal medicine, once what the Biodiversity Library describes as a predominantly domestic practice, a form of creative alchemy, kitchen magic for the sick and suffering became the scientific study of botany.

Those authors and publishers were almost always men, which provided them authority. But what is less documented, but widely understood by historians of science, is that the drawings themselves, artful, painstaking, precise, beautiful renderings of plants that filled those publications where very often made by women and children. Their creative hands did the work, albeit their names did not appear on the title page.

Women Who Changed Everything Anyway

Despite this systemic silencing, women found ways through.

In the mid-1600s, Maria Sibylla Merian a German naturalist and artist changed the history of both science and art simultaneously. Her scientific studies of entomology, insects and the plants they inhabited were groundbreaking, and her illustrations were extraordinary. She paved the way for what art historian and botanist communities now recognise as a lineage of women polymaths artists who were also scientists, healers who were also observers, illustrators who were also intellectuals.

By the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Blackwell trained as an artist in Aberdeen and self-educated in medicine and herbal pharmacology produced what scholars at ArtMeetsScience.co describe as a landmark work in botanical illustration, natural science and visual culture. Her Curious Herbal combined creativity, artistic precision with scientific understanding to create one of the most authoritative herbals of her time. She did this, it is worth noting, with a young child in tow, largely to pay her husband’s debts while he sat in debtors’ prison, which reminds us that women have always found remarkable ways to create under constraint.

Then came the golden age. By the 1800s, the rise of the genteel garden and a growing public fascination with the natural world gave botanical illustration a cultural moment. And Anne Pratt, who as a child had suffered from illness and spent her recovery drawing plants and flowers from the garden and became one of its most prolific voices in the field. From the age of 22 until 60, botanical illustration and art was her sole source of income – a sustainable creative career. She published volume after volume of work, bringing the beauty and science of plants to a broad and hungry readership.

What these women were doing was looking, they drew what they saw and in doing so, they preserved precious a piece of the creative healers legacy.

What We Lost and Need More Of

We tend to think of the loss of herbal knowledge as a historical footnote, like something that happened a long time ago, to other people. Truth is, disconnection from the natural world, from slow observation, from the kind of focused attention that drawing demands, is very much a present-day crisis. Particularly for women.

Just this year –  2026, Women’s Mental Health Australia – the nation’s leading organisation in women’s health, from its research findings declared women’s health is in a state of crisis. It is Sobering and ponders the question – where is our collective healing knowledge gone? Can we draw an arch between the crisis, with a loss of ancient healing knowledge and creative intuition that seems mostly lost?

Finding our way back to creative spirit

When I look through the lens of my art practice with my studies in psychology, I find many ways women are finding way back to what is lost.

A 2024 study published in the Psychology of Woman Journal found that structured art-making significantly improved emotional expression and self-worth among women experiencing depression. It addressed what researchers describe as alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe one’s own feelings, which art-making directly counteracts by offering a nonverbal language for inner experience (Conti & Kovács, 2024).

A major review published in Frontiers in Public Health in 2024 found that engagement in creative arts and crafting, including drawing and painting, positively and significantly predicted subjective wellbeing, above and beyond other known factors (Keyes et al., 2024).

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025 found that drawing practice specifically enhanced distress tolerance, mediated by increased psychological resilience, the capacity to recover from adversity and adapt positively to stress (Lyu, Ouyang & Zhang, 2025).

And a thematic review of studies from 2020–2024, examining art’s impact on adult mental wellbeing during COVID-19 isolation, identified five consistent outcomes of creative engagement: emotional processing and expression, adaptive communication, communal support and collective meaning-making, empowerment and regaining agency, and the transformation of trauma into post-traumatic growth (NIH, 2024).

In other words, what the wise women knew, what Maria Sibylla Merian practiced, what Anne Pratt built a creative life around, how Elizabeth Blackall innovated, it seems the science is now catching up to confirm.

Looking closely at the natural world, drawing what you see, making something with your hands in the company of others. This are our creative medicine.

With What I See, What I’m Building

About five weeks ago I was blindsided by shingles. If you’ve had it, I am deeply sorry, because it totally sucks. I had no idea what I was in for. The pain was like no other. I spent the first few weeks largely bedridden.

One of the first things I did was reach out to a naturopath for healing herbs and tinctures and it measurably helped. But so did something else.

Once I could get myself out of bed and to the kitchen table, I started drawing. Nothing fancy, just the apples in a bowl, an eggplant, an onion, whatever was in my line of sight. I’d take my herbs and draw. And I can tell you honestly: once I started drawing, the pain dissipated. The focused, quiet attention of observing something and putting it on paper did something that nothing else could quite reach.

I lived the research. And I thought of every woman who had ever done the same at a kitchen table, in a garden, in a studio, in a time when her knowledge and her art were rarely credited but always essential.

Ironically, just before I became unwell, I had been finalising details on a collaboration that felt like it had been waiting to happen. Everything went on hold while I recovered and now, I am sharing it.

Drawing & Watercolour: Healing Herbs and Plants at the Apothecary

A six week course in collaboration with Hygea Apothecary, Bolton Street Newcastle

A six week course where the ancient wisdom of medicinal herbs and plants meets the mindful, beautiful art of botanical drawing and watercolour. Held inside the stunning Hygea Apothecary, each Wednesday evening a small intimate group of eight will gather to learn the healing stories and properties of two medicinal plants, guided by me the expert practitioners at Hygēa. We will draw and paint them with depth, detail and intention.

Week by week you will build real botanical skills, a deeper connection to the natural world and a creative practice rooted in slow, mindful observation. The kind that research consistently links to reduced stress, greater wellbeing and a genuine sense of flow – and I guarantee all are welcome, no experience necessary – just your curiosity.

The kind the wise women always knew.

Come and find the lost art of looking with us.

Be well & creative, queen!

Amanda ♥

Want to explore this further? Visit this page for all the details >> HERE

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