The botanical artist Wendy Hollender hedges when asked to name her favorite plant to draw.

   ”I find them all interesting,” she says, until landing on a particular fancy.

   ”One of the things I love to draw is the flowering branches on trees. When Linden trees are blooming, we’re aware of the smell but not aware of where it’s coming from.”

   The flowers are gorgeous but out of eyesight. Collectively they produce a pleasant air but individually they remain concealed.

   ”I like to document those things, the whole life cycle, and blow them up big and show the beauty that’s in the tree every day.”

   Ms. Hollender is the program coordinator for Botanical Art and Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden and a full-time botanical artist who travels the world documenting the rare and the common, the newly discovered and the soon-to-be extinct. Ten years ago she didn’t know such a field existed.

   On March 10 Ms. Hollender will present a lecture on her botanical travels at the Present Day Club. She will describe how she transformed her early efforts to learn the technical skill of botanical art into a successful career. In May she will return to Princeton to present a two-day botanical drawing workshop at Morven.

   Flowers attracted Ms. Hollender’s attention the same way they attract pollinators: by their colors and smell. As a young girl she made a hobby of drawing the flowers growing in her mother’s garden.

   Floral design carried her through her 20-year career as a textile designer. Using photographs for reference, she developed designs for dinnerware and bedding patterns. Once images of older botanical designs began gaining popularity to the point clients were requesting them, Ms. Hollender began a study of floral paintings, some of which were hundreds of years old and printed with exquisite detail and realism.

   Depicting plants through illustration originally began as a way to help ease identification of plants used as medicine, Ms. Hollender says. As plant reference began to span distances and cross cultures, illustration trumped physical description. Languages abound, but pictures are universal.

   The plants and the artwork intrigued her. She imagined a career of adventure and travel, of commissions to paint the gardens of museums and wealthy patrons. As a textile designer Ms. Hollender regretted not working from nature.

   ”I wanted to work from life and be inspired by real life,” she says.

   Ms. Hollender didn’t know botanical illustration was a field; it wasn’t taught while she was in school. (She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in textile design from the Rhode Island School of Design.) She soon began a study of her own.

   Ms. Hollender was born and raised on Long Island. After graduating from college she moved to Manhattan and has lived there since. For a time she rented a house in Connecticut during the summer, and would occupy herself by walking around the lake and collecting flowers in order to identify and draw them.

   ”I wanted to understand the structure of the plant, but when I drew them they were just decorative elements,” she says. “I didn’t understand what was going on because at that point I had no scientific training.”

   She was unable to capture the quality of realism she found in the old paintings.

   ”I was not one of these people able to draw realistically,” she says, adding that her teachers in college never taught her the skills and tricks and techniques to make a three-dimensional object look realistic on a two-dimensional piece of paper.

   Undeterred, she found inspiration at home, growing plants on her terrace, and she also found inspiration in travel. “Anywhere we went on vacation — a tropical beach or in the country — I couldn’t help but bring my sketchbook and draw flowers all day,” she says.

   About 10 years ago, on a spring day, she went to the New York Botanical Garden. She had never been there before. She discovered the garden was offering a certificate program in botanical art and illustration and enrolled the following Monday.

   Although her work is mostly considered fine art, botanical illustration can have purely scientific purposes. Ms. Hollender has recently returned from Hawaii, where she was working with a botanist who has discovered a new member of the mint family. His samples are less than perfect — the leaves are dead and drying and he can’t photograph them.

   Leaves wilt, stems bend, things fall apart. “The flower dies but the drawing never does,” Ms. Hollender says. “If you get a good rendering of the plant and the flower and the color, the next week the flower will be dead but your painting won’t be.”

   In the age of photography there is a belief that botanical illustration is archaic, says Ms. Hollender, adding that, because photography flattens an image and removes detail, it has not made the botanical illustration obsolete.

   ”An illustration can show things a photograph never can,” she says, because of the artist’s ability to emphasize, expand and dissect.

   ”I like to keep it as immediate as possible. When you study plants this closely, you have an eye into nature and creation — how nature creates the plants and their structure. You get a little window into viewing the cycle of life we take for granted. You get to witness it, over and over again. Every single time I look at a plant I see something I didn’t realize.”

Wendy Hollender presents a lecture, The Botanical Traveler, at The Present Day Club, 72 Stockton St., Princeton, March 10, 10 a.m., $35; Morven Museum & Garden, 55 Stockton St., Princeton, Botanical Drawing Workshop, May 9-10, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., $135; (609) 924-8144, ext. 106; www.morven.org; Wendy Hollender on the Web: www.whartdesign.com