An intriguing twist on botanical illustrations.

Polite, pretty botanical illustrations assume a surprising new form in artist Pam Rogers’ thoughtful, poetic works.

Though this Virginia-based artist studied botanical illustration at England’s renowned Kew Gardens, her drawings and paintings suggest botanicals with a conceptual bent, filtered through the lens of contemporary art. Her strange abstractions of the natural world are visions of foliage and flowers warped and changed via her unique artistic sensibility.

Rogers’ solo show “Terra Flora” at Swan Coach House Gallery features drawings and paintings on paper and canvas and installations, all centered on nature: flowers, leaves, ivy, seed pods, pine cones, husks and tree limbs rendered in a style wavering between realism and abstraction. In her busy swirls of line and color, branches and seed pods arabesque across the surface of Rogers’ paintings, which pulsate with shades of green, blue, brown and yellow.

An accurate rendering of the natural world is less central for Rogers than an emotional one, capturing the intensity and sensory immersion of a walk in the woods, the dizzying profusion of growth and movement that defines an encounter with the wild, invasive force of nature.

Her simple, intense drawings are often her strongest works, tight, moody clusters of brambles and thorns like “Meadow Muse #2,” which suggests some barely contained invasive vine. In fact, the paper that drawing is made on was created from 11 invasive plants Rogers found in the Chesapeake watershed area.

In addition to her representation of forest and field, Rogers has distilled something of their essence. She uses a surprising array of materials to achieve her organic color scheme, circling back to plants and soil for her palette. She dips her brush in soil, geranium pigment, mulberry ink and bark pigment as well as the colors achieved by pulverizing sandstone, mica and turquoise.

In addition to weaving the literal elements of nature into her paintings, Rogers creates handmade paper to paint and draw on, crafted from an equally inspiring array of materials: English ivy, mulberry paper, invasive plants and bark.

“Amazing Rare Things” is a representative Rogers work, featuring silken swaths of green and richer aggregations of marigold yellow, orange and gray. Elongated branch-like forms extend across the paper’s surface while a feather and small metal objects like fish hooks and spark plugs are also visible in the swirling activity. Rogers often interweaves elements of the human-made world alongside her natural forms, as if to remind us of the inescapability of culture in the deepest, darkest reaches of the planet.

Her works give the sensation of stumbling across some remnant of the human even in the most remote corner of the world and can seem, for that reason, to have a subtle environmental message.

In some exhibitions where artists go in so many directions — blending this many mediums — chaos or, at least, incoherence can result. But in some cases, the range of works can clarify Rogers’ ideas. Her large installation piece “Seeds, Atlanta” is especially provocative for what it demonstrates of her mixing of nature and culture to suggest their conjoined dimension.

“Seeds, Atlanta” is a strange conglomeration of natural and man-made objects piled in a corner of the gallery. Like some shrine or commemoration, a moss-covered mound like a casket has been heaped with dried flowers, leaves, tobacco, rosemary and hydrangea to resemble a grave draped in memorial flowers. Mixed in among those natural elements are objects that suggest an unshakable, inescapable human presence: bright red rubber, a light switch. Suddenly, memorial shifts to scrap heap in the evanescent manner that distinguishes this compelling artist’s work.