Guided by leading artists and local botanists, students spend an immersive week observing, identifying, sketching & painting seasonal wild plants growing in the dry grasslands above Copşa Mare.
Periods of intensive study at your desk are balanced with fieldwork in this farmed landscape, home to some 300 species of flowering plants.
Resident botanist Mihaela Sava is creating a grasslands herbarium for the school, and leads a small team of illustrators in the production of an illustrated guide of the same.
James & Rachel de Candole are founding subscribers to the
Transylvania Florilegium. This collection of 124 paintings of local plants drawn by 37 botanical artists, each accompanied by the English botanist John Akeroyd's scholarly text, is a valuable part of the teaching of the school.
All meals are eaten together at home, with food grown & prepared by your hosts: Lots of fresh vegetables, buffalo milk, cream & butter, home cured meats, sheep and goat cheese, even our own home ground flours & corn meal!
Here is Işık Güner writing about her class
Here are links in English to botanist John Akeroyd's useful local field guides:
Indicator plants | Indicator butterflies | Grasslands
And here is a link to Paul White's observations on the
flora & fauna of Transylvania:
For details and prices, please write to
We limit places to a maximum of just 6 in each class.
To be sure of yours, please apply in good time!
Photo by Sharon Schuster Thiollier