Painting the Singapore Botanic Gardens

For eight years, Clare Haxby was fortunate enough to live near the Singapore Botanic Gardens. She arrived in Singapore, where she gave birth to her third child, to live there an expatriate with her family. After her son, Alfie, was born, Clare would take daily cool morning walks in the Botanic Gardens with her two children and new baby.

They became regular visitor to the gardens, enjoying the movements of the groups of Tai Chi practitioners, as they strolled amid the magnificent trees and along the beautiful lake with lovely white swans swimming in the water.

Clare has come to know the Botanic Gardens well, returning often to favourite areas dedicated to a particular plant or flower group. Over the years, she’s watched the gardens expand to include a Healing Garden, an Evolution Garden, and the National Orchid Garden. It is this Orchid Garden that has proven to be the most inspirational to Clare’s botanical paintings. As well as another favorite area, known as The Ginger Garden.

Included in her Botanics collection is Clare’s largest painting to date, a triptych titled 'The Botanic Gardens', consists of 'three canvas panels 122 x 122 centimeters each. Clare says of her triptych-- “I wanted to paint on a larger scale to give the viewer the sense of the wraparound green that is the oasis of these gardens in the tropics. I created the painting so that it is like a walk in the gardens, a sensory experience.”

Clare says that the triptych painting actually “excludes the structures of a colonial black and white house; a plantation house and the extravagant sensational flower heads of the Ginger Lilies and the delicate flowers of the Orchids, the national flower of Singapore.” However, you will find these subjects and elements on other canvases in Clare’s painting collections.

Paintings in her Botanics collection include the titles, Sunbird, and My Beautiful Ginger Lilies, both of which Clare will be showing in Venice, Italy this summer, 2015. 

In addition, Clare’s painting, Tropical Heat of the Ginger Lily Garden, was purchased by one of her Singapore collectors for their tropical home in Costa Rica.

At the time of this writing Singapore Botanic Gardens had been granted UNESCO World

Heritage status.