Revered in her time as being “a noted painter of flowers,” but largely-forgotten today, Lena Scott Harris was a Los Angeles-based photographer, painter and publisher who specialized in meticulously-rendered photographs of California wildflowers.

A 1934 profile of Harris explains that she began making art in 1926, after the death of her husband. Without financial support, Harris pursued one of her husband’s unrealized ambitions, “to reproduce in natural colors the state’s profusion of natural blooms.” Not only did Harris teach herself photography and oil painting, but she also learned the popular and classical names of hundreds of hundreds of varieties of wild plants. She took extensive and sometimes precarious journeys to locate specimens for her work, trekking through Death Valley or climbing the slopes of Mt. Whitney or Mt. Shasta. By 1933, she had walked over 20,000 miles up and down the state. She photographed and painted her botanical subjects in the field in order to ensure an accurate result.

Harris exhibited her work throughout the state, often using the shows as an opportunity to stress the importance of conservation. A 1929 exhibit, “The Commandments of the Flowers,”which was held in the State Building of Exhibition Park in Los Angeles, featured 200 life-size color reproductions of Harris’ work. The images were compiled, “for the purpose of educating the youth and the motoring public in the appreciation of the value and the beauty of the wild flowers of California and the necessity of their preservation in the interest of posterity.”