Edgar Dell
Encyclopedia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
n painter best known for his watercolour paintings of that state's wildflowers.
Born in England in 1901, he emigrated to Western Australia in 1924, where he bought and cleared a bush block at Kalamunda, establishing an orchard
Orchard
An orchard is an intentional planting of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit or nut-producing trees which are grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive...
there. During the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
he made a living cutting timber in the bush, and also painted wildflowers for West Australian Newspapers Ltd., which published one painting a week in a colour supplement to The Western Mail
Western Mail (Western Australia)
The Western Mail, or Western Mail, was the name of two weekly newspapers published in Perth, Western Australia.-West Australian newspapers:...
These were accompanied by a botanical description by Charles Gardner
Charles Gardner
Charles Austin Gardner was a Western Australian botanist.Born in Lancaster, England on 6 January 1896, he emigrated to Western Australia with his family in 1909....
, then Government Botanist, and were so popular that they were compiled into book form and published under the title Western Australian Wildflowers in 1935. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1958, and again in the 1970s under the title Wildflowers of Western Australia. This ran to numerous editions, albeit with ever-diminishing numbers of Dell's plates.
Little is known of Dell's later life, but as late as 1973 he was still living on the Kalamunda block that he cleared in the 1930s. He died in 2008, at the age of 106.
Publications
- Dell, Edgar (1936). Flowers of Western Australia. Perth, W.A. West Australian Newspapers. 129 leaves of plates. note – cover title: Wild flowers of Western Australia.
- Dell, Edgar (1937). Poison plants of south-western Australia: from water colour drawings description by C.A. Gardner; colour plates by West Australian Newspapers. Perth, W.A.: West Australian Newspapers.