Margaret Saylor is a Pennsylvania artist who paints botanical subjects — plants, fungi, and the parts of the forest floor most people step over — in egg tempera on panel and graphite on vellum. Her work sits at the point where scientific precision meets artistic sensitivity: looking as hard as an illustrator, composing as deliberately as a painter. A BFA in Communications Design from Kutztown University shapes how she constructs each piece, experimenting with the juxtaposition of graphic shape and natural form until an image feels thoughtfully composed and still deeply grounded in observation. The mediums are slow on purpose, a good match for subjects that reveal themselves gradually, and most of what ends up on the panel she's foraged and studied herself, sometimes for years before it's ready to paint.

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Always looking down rather than up, she's drawn to bracket fungus, leaf litter, the small stuff at ankle height — the delicious complication of imperfection, the way a living subject never quite holds the same shape twice. It's work rooted in the Pennsylvania landscape, in the up-close personalities of the plants that live within it.

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Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon. She holds a Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration, with distinction, from the New York Botanical Garden. In spring 2025, a three-week artist residency at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation gave her the space to begin an egg tempera piece called We Were Here First, featuring native plants such as dogbane. For more than a decade, she's exhibited with the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators. She's also a longtime member of the American Society of Botanical Artists and sits on staff for its journal, The Botanical Artist, which she edits and designs.

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Teaching takes her to Longwood Gardens, Mt. Cuba Center, and Wayne Art Center — where her next exhibition, Rooted: Plants in Place, opens in February 2027 — along with other venues across the mid-Atlantic. She also co-founded The Artful Wild, an online teaching platform built around steady, observation-based instruction, with fellow artist Kelly Leahy Radding.

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[See Rooted and other exhibitions →]