Elsie Louise Shaw

Elsie Louise Shaw was a naturalist and botanical artist many of whose watercolors are now in the collection of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University.

As an illustrator, Shaw provided 48 full-page color plates for Frances Theodora Parsons' book How to Know the Wild Flowers (1893), which was the first field guide to North American wildflowers.

It was something of a sensation: the first printing sold out in five days, and it was praised by Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling, among others.

[2] Shaw collected specimens of eastern North American wildflowers for the Gray Herbarium as well as for the University of Maine and the New England Botanical Club.

She painted watercolors from these specimens—sometimes in the field—as well as from specimens collected by botanists like J. Franklin Collins, Merritt Lyndon Fernald, C.D.