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With the critical emphasis our region places on the new, there's not much talk about botanical artists. Yet their number is far larger than might be imagined.

The explanation lies in the certificate program in Botanical Art and Illustration at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, in partnership with the U.S. Botanic Garden, and another at the Brookside Garden School of Botanical Art and Illustration in Bethesda. Among the Corcoran program graduates is Eva-Maria Ruhl, whose drawings, watercolors and oils are on view at Orchard Gallery in Bethesda.

Rooted in antiquity, botanical art is closely allied to science, and its development has followed waves of scientific inquiry though the centuries. Although often fanciful, illustrations of plants can be found in medieval manuscripts, and Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer made careful renderings of plants and flowers. However, the explosion of interest in horticulture that began in the later 16th century, stimulated in part by the excitement of recording the new plants and animals of the New World, led to a great awakening of this art and the emergence of specialists to carry it out. Importantly, notwithstanding masters like the Florentine Jacopo Ligozzi, women artists have always dominated the field. Among among the most successful women in the history of western art are Giovanna Garzoni and Maria Sibylla Merian, botanical artists who rendered birds and insects as well as flowers.

Ruhl's work continues this tradition. Strongly influenced by her teachers, Leslie Exton at the Corcoran, and Alice Tangerini, an illustrator of the Botanical Arts collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Ruhl makes delicate renderings of flowers and other plants with scrupulous fidelity. The time-honored formats for these illustrations are either a central image on an otherwise blank field, or bouquets, frequently with handwritten labeling of the taxonomy of the plants, or individual flowers in a bouquet. The present exhibit, "...plants in suspense..." shows Ruhl both fitting this template and also branching out of it, particularly in her oil paintings. All in small scale, each features a hot colored plant against a very dark background painted with less detail in keeping with the oil medium. Good examples of this are her "Baby Fig," "Leaf Dangle" and "Azalea." Working from a white ground, the plant images retain a great deal of luminosity heated up by the high contrast with the black around them. With this effect, and the reduction of minute detail, these paintings move closer to still life, recalling in particular early 17th century Spanish still lifes.

On the other hand, Ruhl's highly detailed drawings of mushrooms, and her watercolors of flowers and buds are clearly botanical. What sets her work apart is her interest not only in the sequential representation of the stages of the life of a plant — typical of the tradition since ancient times, and referenced here in three watercolors of Golden Rain tree pods — but also her focus on the last stages, that is, on plants already past their prime and into deterioration.

In the curling back of leaves and separation of parts of flowers Ruhl sees another stage of life, a "dancing" as she calls it. Among images of this kind is "Mr. Rick's Roses." Painted during the snowstorm, three preserved roses have lost their petals, their centers sprouting dry curly stamens. Their arrangement on the page resembles three ballerinas en pointe.

That "dancing" quality Ruhl favors also can be seen in her "Azalea bud" and in the larger "First Date" that shows tulips suspended with clothespins on a line in an effort to preserve the flowers. The introduction of narrative in works like the latter is also a departure from the strict tradition of neutral illustration customary in the field. All in all, the allure of the straight botanical paintings is perhaps strongest, but one can't help but admire Ruhl's adventuresome application of personal expressiveness to the genre.

A few words about an exhibit of three women artists at the Glenview Mansion in Rockville, consisting of quilted squares based on Indian kolam designs by Lauren Kingsland, oils by Monica Stroik and woven copper relief paintings by Suzanne Donazetti. Donazetti's contribution stands out as the most interesting and original. Working in a technique she more or less invented, she creates three-dimensional abstract landscapes by painting and weaving strands of sheet copper. The effect is striking, and the process of making them is complicated and labor intensive. Some of the works are simple waves of woven copper, undulating from the wall.

Others are more complex, and larger, with cut shapes woven over and into the straight warp and weft of the copper strands. One such work, "Malpais Memory," shows a plantlike shape in the middle, with a particularly refractive surface. Malpais is on the coast of Costa Rica, its shape suggesting some tropical fruit tree and the shining water behind. Also impressive was the larger, blue-toned "Axis Mundi," and "Spring Runoff" in gilded earth colors.