Alfred William Parsons RA (2 December 1847 – 16 January 1920) was an English artist: illustrator, landscape painter and garden designer.

[6] Parsons, whose interest in "Englishness"[7] paralleled the tastes of upper-class American émigrés, joined the notable artistic community in the village of Broadway in the Cotswolds (Worcestershire).

[8] His associates included the American artists Francis Davis Millet, who remained Parson's closest friend until he drowned aboard the Titanic, and Edwin Austin Abbey, with whom he collaborated in illustrated books.

Parsons' first garden commission, however, came through the architect Philip Webb, who was designing Clouds in Wiltshire for Mr and Mrs Percy Wyndham, prominent figures among the aesthetic-minded group called "The Souls": Parsons provided an unostentatious planting of spring bulbs, Magnolia × soulangeana, roses and lilies, in a framework of clipped yews, wedding new and old elements.

Parsons' fine illustrated book, his only published text, Notes in Japan (London, 1895, reprinted) came from his visit to that country between 1892 and 1894.

Ellen Willmott's The Genus Rosa, published in two volumes between 1910 and 1914,[16] includes 132 watercolours of roses painted by Parsons between 1890 and 1908, which are now held by the Lindley Library in London.