Celia Crampton has added to her long list of artistic triumphs with the inclusion of her work in a £10,000 royal tome, she tells John Hudson

I t's not unusual for people who contribute to books to be sent a complimentary copy, but Celia Crampton isn't holding her breath over her latest venture into print.

A voluntary artist-in-residence at the National Trust's Hidcote Manor Garden in the North Cotswolds, Celia has a painting in the second volume of Prince Charles's Highgrove Florilegium, which with the first volume records a selection of plants to be found on his 15-acre Gloucestershire estate. There are 124 plates, the work of 72 leading botanical artists from around the world.

The reason she's not expecting the postman's knock at her home just over the border in Oxfordshire is simple: just 175 copies of the set are being created by Addison Publications – at an eye-watering £10,950 a time. Each is hand-bound and signed by the Prince, with profits going to his charity foundation to support a wide range of causes.

Celia's contribution is the cowslip seen here – and if you can't spot the royal crest on it, it's no great surprise.

"I'm afraid it's not from the wildflower meadow at Highgrove but my own lawn, where there are lots of them," she says. "I didn't feel there'd be a lot of difference!

"To have your work included in something like this is a tremendous honour and a real privilege. These florilegia last for generations, so they're lovely to be represented in." Amazingly, that having been said, she's not overwhelmed by the reproduction of her painting in this mega-priced book; it's OK, but she's seen better.

She sees herself primarily as an illustrator, and one with a wide variety of experience before she specialised in botanical work.

At the National College of Art back home in Dublin, she started off aiming to be a bookbinder, but got sidetracked into stained glass, a choice that led to 10 years as a conservator, glass painter and lead glazier at the Canterbury Cathedral workshop.

She went to the cathedral city because of her husband Dick's post at the University of Kent, and when she began to find the physical demands of glass restoration too heavy – "I was simply getting too old" – she went into other work, including quite a spell as a medical rep visiting doctors – "my drug-pushing years!".

She might have been lost to professional art for good – but when Dick took up a new job in Washington DC, she found a course at the Corcoran School of Art in botanical painting.

The couple later returned to Britain, and it was as an accomplished performer that she completed her education with the renowned Anne Marie Evans at the Chelsea Physic Gardens.

That was in 2002, and since then she has enjoyed an exciting career, winning a prestigious botanical award at the Chelsea Art Society annual exhibition in 2003, and the Royal Horticultural Society gold medal at the BBC Gardeners' World Live show at the NEC in 2004. Examples of her work are to be found at Kew Gardens and the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, America's largest botanical collection.

Celia is well aware that she is working in a time-honoured tradition. They were painting plants on walls in ancient Egypt and by the Middle Ages, monks were creating herbals in a formula that is still familiar today, with the flowers, foliage, stem and roots recorded in faithful detail.

Over and above these, however, she enjoys painting plants less formally, and at times with a subtle sense of humour.

"One of my paintings is of Brussels sprouts in rows, and I incorporated a foetus into one of them," she says.

"A child of four or five spotted it in an exhibition. 'Look, there's a baby there', he told his mum, who hadn't seen it at all.

"Another time I put eyes in a pineapple. I've done a beetroot with a snail on it. You have to concentrate to see these things but I love to press the boundaries of the discipline."

It's an approach that goes down well at Hidcote Manor Garden, where Celia is to be found working in the plant house on Tuesdays.

"I'm there principally to entertain the visitors," she says. "They talk to me about what I'm doing, about the materials I'm using and the plants I'm painting at the time. I'm certainly not out to paint every plant at Hidcote. That would take several lifetimes.

"But what I can do is document new plants that come in and any of which there is a variety exclusive to there. For instance, I had a week to study and paint a Hidcote erythronium, a kind of lily with interestingly marked leaves. That involved the whole plant, the bulb, different parts of the flowers..."

Celia has visited Highgrove just once, on an outing for the Hidcote team of volunteers. But she looks forward to being there again next month when Prince Charles holds a reception for all who have been involved in the Highgrove Florilegium.

There's also an exhibition of the paintings in the books at the new Garden Museum in Lambeth Palace Road, London, which was launched at the Chelsea Flower Show and runs to August 31. This is the first time they have been seen in this country, though oddly, they have already been displayed in California and New York.

The Garden Museum sounds well worth a visit, created on the site where the 17th-century John Tradescant is buried. Not entirely coincidentally, he was the first man to compile a florilegium focusing on just one garden – Hatfield House.

In ancient times, florilegia were created to chronicle plants for medical reasons and later to record findings by explorers. It was Tradescant who recognised them as a way of celebrating a garden by recording its contents.

As for Celia, her next big project is an exhibition in Chelsea to coincide with the 2011 flower show. She and half-a-dozen other leading botanical illustrators have already booked a gallery.

It's a venue that doesn't come cheap, but let's hope botanical painters are also sound financial tipsters.

"Why 2011? We think the money will have come back by then," she muses.

It wasn't a consideration that bothered the old monks with their herbals long ago.