Alison Marjorie Ashby
1901–1987 · Australian botanical artist and plant collector
Alison Marjorie Ashby (7 February 1901 – 12 August 1987) was an Australian botanical artist and plant collector. Her paintings and the specimens she gathered for herbaria helped document the native flora of Australia in the twentieth century.
Born in Adelaide, South Australia, she was the youngest of four children of the property developer and naturalist Edwin Ashby. In 1902 the family moved to a farming property at Blackwood, at the foot of the Adelaide Hills, land that later became the Wittunga Botanic Garden. Because of shyness, a bad stutter and hypothyroidism, she was mainly educated at home. Encouraged by her father, she developed an interest in native plants and began painting wildflowers.
After both her parents had died, from 1944 she made longer trips to collect plants for various herbaria and also propagated them from seed and cuttings. From 1963 to 1977 she made regular annual car journeys to collect and illustrate plants, travelling to southwest Australia in winter and to the Australian Alps in summer. In 1972 she moved to Victor Harbor, where she died in 1987.
Her legacy includes the share of the Wittunga property she inherited, donated to the National Trust of South Australia in 1957 and became the 32-hectare Watiparinga Reserve, as well as about 1500 botanical paintings, mostly donated to the South Australian Museum and now held in the State Herbarium. Several plants are named after her, including Acacia ashbyae.