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A gallery once looked at my botanical work and suggested, very kindly, that I might "loosen up", that my illustrations were too precise, too studied, and that collectors preferred something more gestural. I thanked them, shook hands, and never called again. My accuracy is the entire point of the work. I did not take the suggestion. I have my own war stories, but I'd rather hear yours. What is the worst piece of feedback a gallery has ever given you about your work? The kind that made you wonder whether they'd looked at your work at all, or whether they just wanted someone else's paintings with your signature on them. I suspect we all have at least one.

I've been painting the same rue stem for eleven days and I've only just got the underside of one leaf right. Rue is a difficult plant to love. The leaves are a blue-green that behaves nothing like a blue-green should, and the oil glands are translucent dots you can see straight through, which means every layer of wash underneath has to be correct before you even think about the top one. Get it wrong and the dots read as blemishes rather than glands. I have scraped and repainted that single leaf four times. The paper is beginning to show it. I keep a sheet of studies alongside the finished piece and the studies are, frankly, more interesting than anything I've produced this month. Eleven days of the same plant and the only thing I've learned for certain is that I was rushing the shadow under the midrib. Which I knew. I've taught it. I've said it out loud to students in that slightly smug way one does. There's a point somewhere past the tenth hour where accuracy stops being a technique and starts being a kind of attention, and I don't think it can be hurried into. I used to believe I could get there faster with better preparation. Better paper, better brushes, a stricter drawing. I have all of those now and it still takes eleven days. The stem itself is done, for what it's worth. It's the leaves that are the trouble.

A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler. I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable. She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.