Rebecca John was born into a family of painters, the most famous among them being her grandfather, Augustus John, and her great-aunt, Gwen John. And the last thing she wanted was to become a painter herself. So how did this happen? In Thinking the Plant she traces the path that led to her beautiful botanical watercolours. She takes us through her childhood - the cottage in the Cotswolds 'where I first became intensely aware of nature in its wild state', her grandfather's home at Fryern Court in Hampshire and her parents' London house, both of them forever associated in her mind with 'growing things'; the Fine Jewellery course where 'I learned to draw - and to concentrate on things close up', her days as a picture researcher and her growing delight in botanical paintings. Rebecca John was in her thirties when she began to 'make tentative pencil studies of flowering plants'. In 1994 she enrolled for the new Botanical Painting course at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Soon after, she began to spend more time at her mother's cottage in Wales where she could work close to nature. She achieved recognition as an artist when she was in her 50s. Drawing on contemporary diary entries and notes Thinking the Plant is a unique record, illustrated with Rebeccca John's exquisite watercolours.

'It is right that, after more than one hundred years, she should have her say' John Carey, Sunday Times

Twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday, on the foggy morning of Saturday 12 January 1901, Ida Nettleship married Augustus John in a private ceremony at St Pancras Registry Office. The union went against the wishes of Ida's parents, who aspired to an altogether more conventional match for their eldest daughter. But Ida was in love with Augustus, a man of exceptional magnetism also studying at the Slade, and who would become one of the most famous artists of his time.

Ida's letters - to friends, to family and to Augustus - reveal a young woman of passion, intensity and wit. They tell of the scandal she brought on the Nettleship family and its consquences; of hurt and betrayal as the marriage evolved into a three-way affair when Augustus fell in love with another woman, Dorelia; of Ida's remarkable acceptance of Dorelia, their pregnancies and shared domesticity; of self-doubt, happiness and despair; and of finding the strength and courage to compromise and navigate her unorthodox marriage.

Ida is a naturally gifted writer, and it is with a candour, intimacy and social intelligence extraordinary for a woman of her period that her correspondence opens up her world. Ida John died aged just thirty of puerperal fever following the birth of her fifth son, but in these vivid, funny and sometimes devastatingly sad letters she is startlingly alive on the page.