If you didn’t manage to get tickets for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, or indeed the crowds put you off, the Saatchi Gallery’s fifth RHS Botanical Art and Photography Show boasts a stunning collection of images of plants from around the world. Much like at Chelsea, artists compete for a Royal Horticultural Society medal, as well as a “best in show” award – but entry is free, and pre-booking is not required. The judging panel is fastidious: an extended reviewing process evaluates each piece of work’s aesthetic appeal, scientific accuracy and technical skill. This year, the focus is on what RHS art curator Charlotte Brooks describes as ‘the deep connection between plants and people, highlighting their significance in our everyday lives and demonstrating the enduring relevance of botanical art’.

Until the invention of photography, botanical illustration was the primary way to visually catalogue plant life. The earliest surviving illustrated manuscript is De Materia Medica, by the first-century AD Greek physician and botanist Dioscorides, who is considered the father of pharmacology. Botanical illustration not only required artistic skill, but also a degree of scientific and horticultural knowledge; accuracy was key since the illustrations were relied on not only by gardeners, but botanical scientists, physicians and pharmacists. Many of the earliest medical texts were referred to as “herbals” since they were guides to healing or medicinal plants. 

Some of the most striking illustrations in the Saatchi exhibition include Traditional Cosmetics Plants of Korean Women by the newly formed Korean Society of Botanical Art and Illustration. Five artists are featured, and each illustration of plants used for cosmetic purposes is meticulously drawn, with time spent on every detail; in the tradition of botanical illustrators, they hope their work will become a scientific record. Hideko Kamoshita is an award-winning illustrator from Japan whose work is exceptional. With its clusters of pink flowers and distinctive bark embellished with horizontal bands, Flowering Cherries in Japan is as delicate and distinct as the tree itself. 

The photography is no less handsome. Fran Black’s atmospheric black-and-white image of the isolated Acacia Cyclops #4, which is common to locations exposed to coastal winds, shows how windblown trees adapt and thrive. Michele Turriani, who assisted Jeff Koons before moving to London to pursue music photography, also has a keen eye for large-scale photographic still lifes; Mid-August, his vividly coloured, almost hyperreal Saatchi entry, is one of a series of cut flowers photographed during the natural growing season between April and November. A personal favourite is by leading garden photographer Andrea Jones, who, alongside the other photographers and illustrators, hopes that her images will lead to a greater appreciation of the natural world. Window on a Perennial Border is shot inside a wood-panelled space that looks out onto luminous greenery stippled with touches of white, yellow and red. It’s the kind of view of which you would never tire, a view to be savoured, respected and valued.

The RHS Botanical Art and Photography Show is at the Saatchi Gallery from 13 June-27 July 2025