Peter Loewer
b. 1934
Peter Loewer is a well known author and botanical illustrator of over thirty books on gardening, native plants and wildflowers. He began his career studying the graphic arts with Gene Vass at the Albright School in Buffalo, New York. After graduation, he entered the Brooklyn Museum School on a Max Beckmann Fellowship. There his study of painting with Reuben Tam ended abruptly when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1959.
After serving his term of duty he founded a studio in Manhattan devoted to scientific and botanical illustration. He worked in that field until the mid-1970s when he began writing and illustrating books on natural history and gardening. His second book, "Bringing the Outdoors In", contained many intricate pen and ink drawings of various plants. It was named the best gardening book of 1974 by "House Beautiful". In 1989 his self-produced book for Rodale Press, "Gardens by Design", was given the award for the best-designed and illustrated book at the Philadelphia Print Show.
In 1991, "The Wild Gardener: On Flowers and Foliage for the Natural Border" was published by Stackpole Books. It included fifty scratchboard illustrations and was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the top seventy-five gardening books produced in the twentieth century. Other notable books by Loewer include "Thoreau's Garden: Native Plants for the American Landscape" (1996, Stackpole Books) a children's book, "The Moonflower" (with Jean Loewer, 1998, Peachtree Publishers), "The Evening Garden: Flowers and Fragrance from Dusk till Dawn" (2002, Cornett, 2004, Stackpole Books), the last of which contains seventy of Loewer's drawings.
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