Margaret Saylor is a Pennsylvania artist who paints mushrooms, fungi, and the plants of the forest floor — the small, easily overlooked things most people step past — in watercolor, graphite, and egg tempera on vellum and gesso board. Her work pairs botanical accuracy with a close eye for shape, form, and color, built up in fine, deliberate detail — looking as hard as an illustrator, composing as deliberately as a painter. Her painting of Dryad's Saddle appears in Phaidon's Fungi: The World of Mushrooms (2026), and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University.

Trained as a graphic designer, she earned a BFA in Communications Design from Kutztown University and spent ten years at William Fox Munroe, Inc., a package design firm in Shillington, Pennsylvania. That background shaped the precision she later brought to fine art, when she turned to painting as a more hands-on way of studying the natural world. In 2013, she earned a Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration, with distinction, from the New York Botanical Garden. She teaches botanical art online and in person at Longwood Gardens (Kennett Square, PA), Mt. Cuba Center (Hockessin, DE), Wayne Art Center (Wayne, PA), and Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens (Devon, PA).

Margaret is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists and the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators, exhibiting with both, and has served as Editor/Designer of The Botanical Artist, ASBA's quarterly journal, since 2013. She is a recipient of a botanical artist residency at Oak Spring Garden Foundation.