A Cabinet of Beautiful Poisons

I'm Natalie, the artist behind Herbarium Nocturne. I make fine art and archival prints at the crossing of botany, symbolism and the beautifully macabre. But before this botanical corner of the world, there was a very different kind of work.

Natalie's hands drawing at her desk with a pencil and ruler

I · The First Life

Trained as an embalmer, I spent years working in the quiet world of the dead. It was work that demanded precision, reverence and steadiness in the presence of what many people turn away from.

To me, it was not morbid. It was a last tending, a final act of care. It left me with a particular way of seeing: finding beauty where others see only darkness, and lingering over things the world rushes past.

I had always known that the most beautiful things often carry a hidden sting.

II · The Turning

My fine art degree had never gone quiet. When I left the embalming room to return to art, it felt less like abandoning my past and more like transforming it.

My fascination with poisonous plants had been there all along. Now it became a language of its own. Aconitum with its cathedral-blue hoods. Datura opening its white trumpets at dusk. Belladonna, the beautiful lady. Exquisite plants with dangerous secrets.

III · The Spark

A visit to the flowers exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery brought those threads together. Surrounded by botanical work, I recognised something I had been circling for years.

What if poisonous plants could be woven together with the symbols we use to understand life and death? Tarot and its archetypes. The zodiac and the turning sky. Anatomy, that intimate map of the body. The dark twin of the birth flower: not the pretty bloom on a greetings card, but its shadow.

Detail of Natalie's Death tarot artwork, combining a skull, winding roots and yew foliage

IV · What Is Made Here

Herbarium Nocturne grew from that intersection. My work draws on old apothecary manuscripts, poisoner's texts, star charts and anatomical atlases, exploring the places where beauty and danger meet.

This is not art about death. It is art about living awake to the whole of things: the poison and the remedy, the shadow and the bloom, the skull beneath the flowers.

It is made for those who have always been drawn to the darker edge of beauty, and who feel at home among the curious, the forgotten and the beautifully strange.

Natalie
Herbarium Nocturne