An artist on the trail of state flowers

After the Oklahoma territory declared mistletoe the state's flower, Dorothy Weissenberger devoted half her lifetime to convincing the state to abandon the parasitic herb - which she called "a dreadful plant" - in favor of the hybrid Oklahoma tea rose, developed within the state.

She succeeded just as Huddy was wrapping up her work. So the artist painted a 52nd watercolor, Oklahoma's rose, and now she wonders whether there will be more replacements.

Huddy didn't know these stories when she was first commissioned to depict the 50 state flowers - plus the District of Columbia rose - for display in a townhouse that serves as the Capitol Hill center for the Credit Union National Association.

She admits she underestimated the challenge, saying she's a typical city artist who bought a home with a finished garden. Experience told her that she didn't have a green thumb, although she was at home with nature.

She so adores a 250-year-old white sycamore tree in her neighborhood that she's painted it 33 times over 18 years.

With the state flowers, she wanted to see, smell, feel, and understand what she would paint.

To find specimens, she looked around her as she took walks, peeked into private gardens, visited the US Botanic Garden, stopped on highways to snap pictures, and scoured libraries for photos and drawings.

In her own backyard, she had dogwood, mountain laurel, magnolia, and rhododendron, all of which are official floral emblems of one or more states.

She eventually brought 36 live flowers to her cramped, second-floor workspace/gallery in a post-World War I torpedo factory. She's worked there for 23 years - paintbrush in hand, visitors popping in, her huge picture window framing the Potomac River, where once George Washington would pass on his way to and from his nearby Mount Vernon estate.

To supplement the live plants, "I might have had as many as 10 different photos and books [at one time]," Huddy says. "I taped them all up around the image that I was working on."

It was an effective way to tackle a project undertaken by only a few artists through the years.

Any collection of paintings of state flowers is "a rarity," notes James J. White, art curator for the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"I did the drawing realistically," Huddy says, "but the painting came out the way I paint. They are not botanical. I didn't do every thorn and wormhole. To me, they are the feeling of the flower."

Now that she's concluded, visitors to her studio always want to see the flower of their state. And often they are surprised, Huddy says, "to find out that it isn't the flower they thought it was."

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