Marianne North, an unmarried middle-aged Victorian lady of comfortable means, set off in 1871 on her first expedition to make a pictorial record of the tropical and exotic plants of the world.
Marianne produced more than 800 paintings which are housed in a special gallery at Kew. This facsimile of the 1914 edition of the Marianne North guide book describes all of the paintings hanging in her gallery, in the positions she allocated for them in 1882.