Catharine Nicholson specialises in very fine pen-and-ink botanical drawing and has work in the Shirley Sherwood Collection; The Lindley Library; The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation and several private collections. She is a Fellow of the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society and is in the process of drawing the ferns in the newly restored fernery. Until its recent closure, she was pen-and-ink representative in the specialist botanical art gallery Hortus in Chelsea Green, London.

She first trained and worked as an architectural historian. Educated at St. Paul's Girls' School, London; St. Hilda's College, Oxford and the Courtauld Institue of Art and Architecture, University of London, she went on to work for several years researching the historic buildings and ancient monuments of Lincolnshire for English Heritage. Throughout this period and the babyhood of her children she drew buildings, from travellers' benders to baroque palaces, gothic cathedrals to post-modern office blocks. When her youngest child reached school age, Catharine went to Kew to retrain as a botanical illustrator under Anne Farrer. Since then she has shown regularly at the R.H.S. Shows in London, being awarded a silver-gilt medal in 2000 for 'Lichens and their Habitats'; a gold medal in 2002 for 'Plants in Architecture' a gold medal in 2004 for 'Pedunculate oak: a year in the life of a fifty-year-old tree'; and a goldmedal for the 'Conifers of Canford' in 2006.She shows regularly in the West Country and her studio is open by appointment.

Catharine has written and illustrated a series of articles on plants in architecture for the quarterly periodical Hortus. It includes: 'The Acanthus in Architecture'; 'The Rose'; 'Plants in Gothic' and 'The Fruit and Flowers of Grinling Gibbons'.She has also written on botanical art for the quarterly periodical 'Art in Devon'.

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