From Plant Sciences Part II to painting the road verges of Britain – award-winning botanical painter Nessie Ramm shares how her time at Cambridge has inspired her art and community work.
Studying Plant Sciences at Cambridge can open up a wealth of career opportunities. In this series, we hear from Plant Sciences alumni about their experiences of studying here, how it shaped their careers and what they are doing now.
If you would like your alumni story featured, please email us at alumni@plantsci.cam.ac.uk.
About Nessie
Nessie Ramm graduated from Girton College, Cambridge with a degree in Natural Sciences (Plant Sciences Part II) in 1997. She went on to study for an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School.
She is now a botanical and landscape painter on a mission to paint the wild verges of Britain and bring the beauty and value of these unloved spaces to our attention. As she explains, her work is a celebration of the plants, insects and birds that flourish there and also a deeper call to re-evaluate our relationship with the natural world.
Nessie is the winner of the NEAC Climate Emergency Prize 2025, a fellow member of the Society of Botanical Artists and is working with Plantlife as their 25-26 Creative Friend. Her work has featured in BBC Countryfile Magazine and Resurgence & Ecologist.
She lives and works in East Sussex where she also leads a community group which is reintroducing wildflowers into local road verges.
You can follow Nessie on instagram @nessie_ramm and find out more about her work at nessieramm.co.uk.
What is your favourite memory from your time in the Department of Plant Sciences?
There used to be (perhaps still is) a greenhouse on the roof. I loved going up there. We had a project involving tea plants which had to be looked after and I was only too keen to do it!
Being at Girton meant I couldn’t just pop home so a secret garden to disappear to between lectures came in handy. It was like entering a magical, timeless place. Great drops of condensation would rain down as you opened the door and the smell was a wonderful humid mixture of plants, compost and wet wood.
There were all kinds of odds and ends from the plant kingdom either earning their keep as part of experiments or else beloved etiolated veterans permitted to live out their days. It felt like a real link to the fundamental discoveries made in the past – to the plant hunters and botanical artists – even as the newer labs downstairs were looking to the future, to manipulating DNA and so on.
As well as that greenhouse, the people I met were inspirational. Our lecturers shared their personal enthusiasm for what they were working on and the space they made for us undergraduates in their busy labs gave an insight into the scientific process.
How did your time in the Department influence your career journey?
Studying plants in detail really fed my wonder.
Apparently, I was a late walker because I was so content crawling around on the ground looking at plants. I wore down the toes of my shoes while the soles were untouched - I didn’t want to miss anything.
So I’ve always loved plants but the opportunity to see and learn in much greater detail felt like being given the secrets of the universe. It opened my eyes to the awesome complexity of things at a smaller scale than we can see. I had the opportunity to take samples of tea root to a scanning electron microscope – I can’t remember the results of my experiment but to get a three-dimensional image of individual cells in such detail was mind-blowing.
That visual language fed into the first oil paintings I did. During my MA in painting I made a series of giant hyper-realistic lawns inspired by the scanning electron microscope images. The feeling that all the ‘ordinary’ plants around us – in the lawns we mow, those we call weeds in our gardens, the ones we use every day for food, clothing or construction – all of these are really so extraordinary and that’s a feeling that’s never left me.
Plants are the foundation of it all – something I think about often, though it rarely is acknowledged. By harnessing starlight as an energy source they drive almost all life on this planet. I still think that sounds like something out of science fiction.
What have you gone on to do since leaving the Department?
Plants have featured in almost every painting I have done in the last 25 years.
After my fine art MA I lived in London and the city began to creep into my paintings. They were still plant-focused but they became a celebration of nature in urban spaces. Allotments, parks and city farms were my favourite places to paint, which I discovered with my A-Z and my bike (another legacy from Cambridge – I cycled round London for years).
Painting is solitary work so alongside making my own pieces in the studio I always like to balance it with some teaching or working in the community. In the 2000s I ran a family art program at Vauxhall City Farm. I got the role because I was so surprised to hear a rooster crowing down a backstreet that I hopped off my bike to investigate. That farm of less than an acre with horses, goats, bees, grapevines and so many precious things right across the park from the M16 building was an oasis of calm in the city, and a lifeline for so many. When I left there I went to a small village in Transylvania, Romania to deliver a similar art program for a charitable organisation.
In the last few years I have become obsessed with road verges! In 2017 I came across hundreds of cowslips nestled on the side of a dual carriageway, and started looking at road verges wherever I went. I discovered that verges have become a refuge for wild things, and a sizeable one at that. When added together they cover an area approximately equal to the county of Dorset. A wildlife reserve we never knew we had. Of course by their nature they are linear so they form a network connecting every kind of habitat in the UK. This may have a vital role in helping plants and animals move in response to the changing climate.
My current body of work documents the wild roadside landscapes I find. I set up my portable easel and make oil paintings on the verges. I also make ‘botanical road signs’ which weave together the text of road signs I encounter with the plants I observe growing at their feet.
What do you enjoy most about what you are doing now?
Of all my work the paintings I’m making now most clearly express my hope and concern for nature in equal measure. Paintings like ‘Reduce Speed Now’ and ‘Changed Priorities Ahead’ both celebrate the ‘ordinary’ and also draw attention to what may be lost. As an artist I feel it’s my duty to not only make beautiful things but to sound the alarm. It’s taken 25 years to get here, but the work I’m making now feels like a culmination of the journey so far which is immensely satisfying.
I’m also starting to work with changemakers involved in conservation and rewilding, like the National Trust and Plantlife. I’m looking forward to more opportunities like this. It’s great to connect across disciplines. There’s a quiet shift in the way we treat nature in the UK, but there’s much more to be done. If I can make even just the smallest difference with my work, then I’ll be very happy with that.
Image: Nessie Ramm in her studio. Photo by James Ratchford.