Mrs. Delany and her Paper Flowers

My mother just lent me this book , The Paper Garden, by Molly Peacock about Mrs. Mary Delany's amazing paper flower collection.    Mrs. Delany lived in England and Ireland from 1700-1788 .  She was always a lively,creative woman, but her tour de force  happened after she turned 72.  She had been widowed for a few years and was still feeling a huge loss from the death of her husband.  One day she noticed that a geranium petal was the same colour as a piece of paper she had.  That set her creative wheels in motion, and soon she was assembling the most amazing collages out of cut paper which she stuck on a black paper background.  The rose on the cover of the book is not a painting; it is cut out of paper and the different colours are layers of different hand-painted coloured paper.  The British Museum has a large number of her almost 1000 flower collages, and on their website you can view enlarged versions that really allow you to appreciate her masterpieces.