page_title: Elsie Louise Shaw
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Elsie Louise Shaw / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: According to season; talks about the flowers in the order of their appearance in the woods and fields Identifier: accordingtoseas00pars (find matches) Year: 1902 (1900s) Authors: Parsons, Frances Theodora, 1861-1952 Subjects: Flowers Publisher: New York, Scribner Contributing Library: NCSU Libraries Digitizing Sponsor: NCSU Libraries View Book Page: Book Viewer About This Book: Catalog Entry View All Images: All Images From Book Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book. Text Appearing Before Image: PLATE V/ Text Appearing After Image: WAKE ROBIN Trillium erect an Note About Images Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original work.
context_page_description: Elsie Louise Shaw was a naturalist and botanical artist many of whose watercolors are now in the collection of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University.
context_section_description: As an illustrator, Shaw provided 48 full-page color plates for Frances Theodora Parsons' book How to Know the Wild Flowers (1893), which was the first field guide to North American wildflowers. It was something of a sensation: the first printing sold out in five days, and it was praised by Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling, among others. The work as remained in print into the 21st century, although most later editions did not include Shaw's color plates (although they do included the black-and-white illustrations by Marion Satterlee.
  Shaw also illustrated another of Parsons' books about wildflowers, According to Season (1902) with 32 full-page color plates.
  Shaw collected specimens of eastern North American wildflowers for the Gray Herbarium as well as for the University of Maine and the New England Botanical Club. She painted  watercolors from these specimens—sometimes in the field—as well as from specimens collected by botanists like J. Franklin Collins, Merritt Lyndon Fernald, C.D. Lippincott, and Arthur H. Norton. Her "wonderfully accurate" paintings often show a small grouping of flowers on the stem with their leaves.
  Her paintings were mounted and bound into eight folios by her family and donated to the Gray Herbarium. The collection covers the years 1887–1934. The folios are organized into flower family groupings as follows:
  Folio 1: Adder's tongue to iris
  Folio 2: Orchids
  Folio 3: Sweet gale to crowfoot
  Folio 4: Barberry to pulse
  Folio 5: Wood sorrel to dogwood
  Folio 6: Heath to borage
  Folio 7: Mint to lobelia
  Folio 8: Composites
caption: Wake robin (Trillium erectum) from According to Season (1902)
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