Susan Loy is an American artist, calligrapher, and author best known for her distinctive Literary Calligraphy® watercolor paintings that combine finely rendered pen-and-brush illustrations with hand-lettered quotations from classic works by writers such as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau. During her graduate studies at The Ohio State University, she worked as a research associate at the Columbus Museum of Fine Arts. In the early 1980s, she developed her signature style of combining hand-lettered texts in the form of a mandala. She founded Literary Calligraphy in 1983 and CSL Press in 1999.
Loy became interested in the Victorian language of flowers and began collecting antiquarian books in this gift-book genre. Between 1986 and 2017, she created thirty-four watercolors in her Language of Flowers Series. Her first book, Flowers, The Angels’ Alphabet: The Language and Poetry of Flowers, published in 2001, features twenty-eight from the series. Loy’s book won Benjamin Franklin Awards in Gardening and in Reference and was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the Independent Book Publishers Association.
A highlight of Loy’s career was being chosen to serve as “The Artist on the Lawn” at the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1998. The following year, she presented the official event poster to President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. The poster featured flowers from the first Easter Egg Roll at the White House and those blooming in 1998.
In 2018, Loy and her husband moved to Prague, Czech Republic, where she created a celebrated Czech Flower Alphabet painting for the Czech Unitarian Church. In 2023, they directed the Prague International Art Exhibition.
Her second book, To Live Deliberately: Protecting and Connecting to Nature Through Prose and Poetry (2023), describes how nature prose and poetry have influenced her life and artwork, and how they can help us all remain connected to nature. The book is illustrated with her original artwork.
Her third book, The Language of Flowers Encyclopedia: A Three-Volume Illustrated History of the Books, Authors, and Meanings of 2,870 Flowers, Herbs, Trees, and Emojis (2026), takes up where her first book left off. Drawing on digitized language of flowers books available online as well as her extensive collection, Loy studied each book’s various editions, reprints, and revisions, how they changed over time, and how different publishers presented the material. Volume 1 presents the language of flowers in a format typical of nineteenth-century gift flower books, with an alphabetic list of flowers and their meanings, and a corresponding list of meanings and their associated flowers. Volume 2 examines the historical roots of the language of flowers, the sources of flower symbolism, and the publishing history of thirty-eight nineteenth-century language of flowers books, including 233 illustrations tracing how advances in color printing techniques enhanced these charming gift books. It also explores how the absence and emergence of copyright laws shaped the genre, revealing who copied whom and the outcome of a court case on copyright infringement, and addresses who published the first language of flowers book in North America. Volume 3 provides a comprehensive botanical dictionary of 2,780 plants with both common and botanical names, as well as the chronological authorship of the thirty-eight books from 1811 through the turn of the century. Finally, it introduces new additions to the language of flowers lexicon, including florist flowers and exotic species unknown to nineteenth-century writers, as well as flower and plant emojis and their symbolic meanings.
