Priscilla Susan Bury

Priscilla Susan Bury, born Falkner (12 January 1799 Liverpool – 8 March 1872 Croydon), was an English botanist and illustrator.

Daughter of a rich Liverpool merchant, she married on 4 March 1830 Edward Bury (1794-1858), a noted railway engineer. Working with amateur botanist William Roscoe (1753-1831), she published in 1831-1834 A Selection of Hexandrian Plants. The engraving was entrusted to the Londoner Robert Havell, engraver of the John James Audubon (1785-1851) plates. The book was carried out in aquatint and the 350 plant drawings painted in part by hand. The subscribers to this large folio numbered only 79, mostly from the Lancashire region, Audubon being one of them. The book was described as "one of the most effective colour-plate folios of its period" by Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt in his The Art of Botanical Illustration.^[1]

Bury was also the author of illustrations for The Botanist of Benjamin Maund (1790-1863).^[2]

Gallery

• 
  Hippeastrum ×johnsonii
• 
  Lily in A Selection of Hexandrian Plants
• 
  Lilium Canadense
• 
  Easter Lily
• 
  Hippeastrum Striatum
• 
  E.F. Seedling Amaryllus, 1819. Minneapolis Institute of Art

Bibliography

• 1859: Recollections of Edward Bury, by his Widow (Privately published, Windermere)
• 1862: Figures of Remarkable Forms of Polycystins, or allied organisms, in the Barbados Chalk Deposit; drawn by Mrs. Bury. Windermere: John Garnett, [1862]

Sources

• Brent Elliott (2001). Flora. Une histoire illustrée des fleurs de jardin. Delachaux et Niestlé (Lausanne): 335 p.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Priscilla Susan Bury.

• Saint Louis Art Museum General background. Image from Hexandrian Plants
• Edinburgh University Press
• A Selection of Hexandrian Plants