Shirley, The Life of a Botanical Adventurer is the remarkable story of Dr Shirley Sherwood, scientist, author, travel writer and gardener. Following the tragic death of her brilliant scientist husband, Michael Cross, in a freak air crash in 1964, she was left as a 30-year-old widow with two young boys aged four and three. For the next twelve years she worked as a key member of the Nobel Prize-winning team which developed Tagamet, the first block-buster drug (sales of over $1 billion a year).
After her marriage to Jim Sherwood in 1977, she left science to concentrate full-time on the huge task of restoring the fabled Orient-Express train, probably the most luxurious and exotic form of travel ever devised. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, running between London and Venice, was relaunched in 1982, ninety-nine years after its first journey. Sherwood's history of the project sold more than 400,000 copies.
The Orient-Express train was just the beginning. The Sherwoods went on to create the five-star Orient-Express Hotels company (now Belmond), which owned some of the finest hotels in the world, including the Cipriani in Venice, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town and the Copacabana Palace in Rio.
They pioneered new train routes across the Alps, started the Eastern & Oriental Express running between Singapore and Bangkok- crossing over the Bridge on the River Kwai opened up tourism in Myanmar with the first cruise ship to operate on the Irrawaddy, and took over the railways of Peru, which run all the way to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca.
Her most lasting achievement, the one of which she is proudest, is the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art, which she started in 1990 and now includes over 1,000 paintings and drawings representing the work of more than 300 contemporary botanical artists from 36 countries. It is the biggest and most important botanical art collection in the world.
She has mounted exhibitions in many prestigious locations including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and the Real Jardin Botanico, Madrid.
The Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens is the first museum to be dedicated to modern botanical art and her books, which often accompanied her exhibitions, have been largely responsible for re-establishing botanical art in its rightful place as an important art form.
