A painter in love with wild flora

My name is Soria Givord. I am a botanical painter, trained in the classical European tradition of scientific illustration. For as long as I can remember, plants have spoken to me more clearly than most people — their geometry, their patience, their quiet abundance.

I work mainly with watercolour on cotton paper, in the slow tradition of nineteenth-century botanical art. Each painting begins outdoors, with hours of observation in the field — sometimes a meadow at dawn, sometimes a forest edge in summer. I take pencil sketches, photographs, fragments of leaves and petals. Then, back in the studio, the work begins in earnest: a slow accumulation of pigment, layer by layer, until the plant seems to lift off the page.

My subjects are mostly wild: native orchids — Ophrys, Orchis, Himantoglossum, Cephalanthera — meadow flowers, medicinal plants, and the quiet companions of the countryside that no one looks at any more. Painting them is, for me, also a way of protecting them.

Each piece is signed in sepia ink and dated. Most are sold as one-of-a-kind originals, with a small number reproduced as numbered fine art prints, hand-signed.