Go on admit it…you’ve never heard of Beatrice Parsons. But believe it or not a century ago she was one of the leading garden painters in Britain, with many exhibitions to her credit, and her pictures collected by fashionable society, including 30 owned by Queen Mary.

Nowadays we might think her work a bit chocolate-boxy, but underneath the sometimes almost unreal, brightly coloured flowers she captures the glory days of the Edwardian border but also the smaller more ordinary gardens of the suburban middle class.

Born in 1870 she was educated at Kings College and the Royal Academy Schools. She started exhibiting at the Academy at the age of 19, and although many of her early subjects were religious or historical in natur...