| William Keble Martin was an English Anglican priest and botanical illustrator who is best known for his meticulous book The Concise British Flora in Colour, which took 60 years of fieldwork and painting for him to produce. His interest in botany began when his uncle taught him how to collect and rear butterflies, which required knowing associated host plants. As a student at Christ Church College Oxford, Keble Martin studied Church History, Greek Philosophy, and Botany. It was during this time that he began illustrating plants. Having begun with illustrating mosses, Keble Martin switched to floral illustration upon realizing his fellow students were having trouble identifying flowers due to the lack of detailed and colored pictures in identification sources at the time. As he began his career in busy industrial churches, he made slow progress with plant collecting and illustration. When he and his family moved to a quieter, rural parish in Devon, Keble Martin was far more botanically productive and was elected a Fellow of the Linnaean Society in 1928. For his Concise British Flora, he created 1480 plates of illustrations showcasing 1486 species occurring in Britain, all in astounding detail. He worked from live plants and pressed herbarium specimens, many of which he collected on his own. A few hundred specimens, often rarer plants, came from over 80 different botanists whom he corresponded with. When he was 88 years old, Keble Martin finally published The Concise British Flora in 1965 with a forward by Prince Philip. It quickly became a bestseller. The following year, the University of Exeter awarded him with an honorary Ph.D. for his lifelong botanical work. |
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