Mary Vaux Walcott was an American botanist from Philadelphia who travelled through the American West and Canadian Rockies collecting and making watercolours of wildflowers. Spending the summer months in the Rockies from childhood, Vaux was also a skilled mountain climber and photographer.

In 1914, Vaux married the palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and worked with him on several of his projects. In 1925, the Smithsonian published this five-volume work containing 400 of her watercolours.