A new crop of artists is reinventing botanicals

In an age where our relationship with nature is fast deteriorating, here’s your new nature fix that doesn’t requisite a green thumb. Cue in, read-of-the-season British writer Olivia Laing’s latest, The Garden Against Time, which is her billet-doux to her tended garden. But for the more visually inclined kind, we have a new crop of artists who are transforming the landscape of botanical art. From delicate paper blooms to lilliputian horticultural kingdoms—these three artists may have very different mediums, but they celebrate the beauty of plant life with a sense of romance, wonder and whimsicality.

Sourabh Gupta, multimedia artist

In 2019, Sourabh Gupta painstakingly crafted 320 white paper daisies by hand for designer Tory Burch’s Met Gala gown. “I didn’t sleep for days,” he recalls of the ethereal white dress. He was back at the Met Gala in 2022, when Oscar de la Renta’s CEO Alex Bolen commissioned him to construct a headpiece for model and heiress, Ivy Getty. The result was a crown of hyper-real serpentine paper vines.

A Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary designer, Gupta is known for creating hyper realistic botanical blooms using artificial materials like paper towels, sponges, shoe polish lids and even, bristles of a brush.

Gupta’s upcycled material-agnostic approach began early on. He grew up in a one-room, windowless home in Hiranagar, a small town in Jammu and Kashmir. “I lived in a very tiny house with no prospect of aesthetics,” he says. His desire to decorate meant he had to build from scratch, which led him to working with available materials and finding “beauty in the simplest of things”—think barbed wires and abandoned tyres.

“It was all about survival,” he explains. “I’ve worked with wood, textile, leather. There was no distinction between art, design or architecture. I didn’t have any boundaries. If it made sense to me, I’d do it. I relied a lot on my instincts and was very self-driven.” At the age of nine, for instance, he fashioned his first paper flowers, using pages torn out of a receipt booklet.

Gupta graduated from the School of Architecture and Landscape Design in Jammu and Kashmir. Yet, he felt an undeniable tug that his calling was elsewhere. “I knew that my world was someplace else,” he says. This led him to winning a scholarship to study Interior Design at Parsons School of Design in New York. Unfortunately, he had to drop out of the program due to financial concerns. “I started doing a bunch of other things after that, since I had to make money to survive,” he says.

In 2017, on a visit to the MET Museum, Gupta came across Japanese designer, Rei Kawakubo’s hyperbolic ensembles with floral motifs which were a part of the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition. It reminded him of the flowers he used to make when he was young, and nudged him to return to his old passion. “I started making botanicals with paper because it was a medium that I could afford.” For colour and texture, Gupta experimented with whatever he could get his hands on: “ketchup, turmeric, mustard seeds, toothpaste, baking soda,” he says.

Soon he was crafting hollyhocks and peonies, and posting them on Instagram. His work caught the attention of high-profile clients, including landscape designer Brian Sawyer, before Tory Burch approached him. “At that time, I had zero idea about the Met Gala,” he admits about the global event that later became his springboard. Since then, Gupta’s work has been featured widely, in publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker.

The artist calls his creative process, “organic”—he is constantly observing, imbibing and imagining. “I draw installations in my mind,” he shares. Gupta sketches a lot—primarily to “get a sense of volume and form” of a botanical sculpture, after which he makes the prototypes. “I’m not interested in just making another daisy—I’m trying to take the memory of that plant and showcase it in a magical, romantic way,” he says.

Sushanto Choudhury, terrarium artist

Sushanto Choudhury, or the The Urban Nemophilist, creates fantastical forests inside 3,000ml glass jars. With precision, he decorates the interiors of a terrarium: verdant plants of varying size, colour, texture and kind. If assembled correctly, these self-sustaining gardens “can outlive you”, informs Choudhury. He goes on to share, “Electrical engineer, David Latimer’s world-known sealed terrarium survived for 60 years with almost no interference. A terrarium is bioactive and can surprise you with new forms of life as it ages.”

Choudhury began assembling these mini forests in 2018. His process of assembling the terrariums is meticulous: It begins with “a memory or a scene” followed by a sketch. Choudhury then uses driftwood and twigs, and superglues them together to create a rich landscape. His jars are layered with lava rock chips, activated carbon flakes, and are swathed with pincushion moss and river stones. Finally, the sapling is added, and a family of springtails sprinkled in. Some are so detailed that they’re even equipped with a waterfall.

Growing up in Durgapur, a small town in West Bengal “amidst lush greenery” sealed Choudhury’s bond with nature. Studying at St Xavier’s, in a campus built around towering sal groves, only strengthened his bond. His mother further encouraged the budding plant whisperer. “Sometimes she would take my sister and myself to the annual botanical fair and we would pick up some plants. The next few days would be spent learning more about them. Those were very exciting times.”

Living on his own, Choudhury experienced what most modern professionals are familiar with—his itinerant work ensured that houseplants were left unwatered, neglected and more often than not, dead. So he decided to explore the terrarium art form, where miniature green ecosystems could thrive independently. “This appeared to be the most logical, cost and space effective—an easy solution to all my gardening woes,” he says. Self-taught, Choudhury pored over botanical literature and watched countless how-to videos. “I also spoke with experts about plants, bryophytes and horticulture in general, as all these are connected,” he adds.

Under the alias, The Urban Nemophilist, which Choudhury describes as “a lover of forests stuck in a concrete urban space”, this naturalist makes YouTube videos to tutor aspiring terrarium-makers to build their own lilliputian forests. “When I started online workshops last year, the response was mostly from the west, but now, I see a lot of sign-ups from India as well.” Choudhury is hopeful then that many more urban nemophilists will sprout across the country.

Nirupa Rao, botanical illustrator

Nirupa Rao inherited her fascination for nature from her family. Her maternal grand-uncle, Fr Cecil Saldanha, pioneered the documentation of flora in Karnataka between 1960s and 1970s; and her own childhood was marked by holidays in the Western Ghats. In 2015, at a plant identification workshop in Kerala, Rao, who was a budding illustrator at the time, received an unusual proposal from two naturalists at the Nature Conservation Foundation, Divya Mudappa and TR Shankar Raman, who run a rainforest restoration programme in the Anamalai Hills. “They wanted to document the tree species they work with, but photography didn’t cut it,” explains Rao.

Many of the green giants were too tall (some 140 feet high) and anatomically expansive. It was impossible to capture them in a single camera frame. “When they saw me sketching a tree at a plant identification workshop, they suggested we try documenting trees through painting,” she recalls. The project led Rao to document 30 of the region’s most important endemic species. Each painting was scientifically accurate, detailing the multihued blooms of the trees, the contours and colour of its leaves, and the fruits it bore.

Rao is now a renowned botanical illustrator, who uses her craft to document plant empires that flourish in India. A TED speaker and a National Geographic Explorers grantee, Rao’s work has been featured across a spectrum of platforms, including Amitav Ghosh’s book cover for Gun Island. The artist, however, is not a trained botanist. Everything Rao has learned has been while practicing in the field for the last 10 years. “I usually have an ecologist with me who shows me what to pay attention to. With trees, I always sketch on site, and take a lot of references photos and notes,” explains Rao.

In 2000, she authored a book titled Hidden Kingdom, a visual compilation of the wild and unusual plants that flourish in the Western Ghats. A grant from the National Geographic supported her research for the book, the pages of which are filled with gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations and poems, encouraging children to engage with it. The book showcases “the richness of the terrain, while also challenging peoples’ most basic notions about plants. In here, there are species with no leaves and no chlorophyll, or giant flowers that smell like rotten flesh.”

What intrigues Rao about flora is its ability to adapt, grow and evolve depending on the changing surroundings. Her challenge is to combat ‘plant blindness’, a common modern-day condition that disables human beings from appreciating the many species that exist in our immediate environment. Through her watercoloured works, Rao wishes to mend people’s fractured relationship with nature. “I hope to re-open our eyes to our own surroundings, reintroducing plants into the mainstream consciousness,” she says.