Mally lived in a private area in the centre of the Lost Gardens of Heligan where she had a large studio in which she painted and taught on a regular basis. Having lived there for 20 years she saw Heligan through all seasons and so she knew the wild flowers and trees of the outer estate very well, together with the flowers and shrubs of the Northern gardens.

In the early days Tim Smit asked her to provide all the botanical illustrations for Heligan Wild, a Year of Nature in the Lost Gardens (now out of print). The 46 paintings became the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tradescant Garden Museum in Lambeth, London. Subsequently she was asked to illustrate Heligan Days, a Perpetual Diary.

All Mally’s pictures were painted with artists’ watercolours on good quality paper and the giclée prints are made with fade-resistant, archival inks on archival paper.

Mally was a Fellow of the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society and she formed a similar Society for the Eden Project in 2000 for which she was elected as a Fellow of the Linnaean Society in 2012.

Mally had the good fortune to be taught her skills in the late 1980s by Anne-Marie Evans FLS and she always followed her principles. Away from her studio she also tutored botanical art at the Eden Project, the Bath Society, the South West Society, the Gloucester Society, Stourhead, Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, Truro Arts, Boconnoc House and Trengwainton Gardens in Cornwall. She tutored artists ranging from complete beginners through to advanced levels and two have been awarded Gold Medals in recent years by the RHS. She was particularly proud of being the sole tutor of Laura Silburn who achieved three Gold Medals, Best in Show and Best Botanical Painting at the RHS Botanical Art Shows in London in 2013, 2014 and 2018.

Mally was also a Fellow of the Eden Project Florilegium Society and she provided the inspiration and instruction in her Saw-pit Studio at Heligan for two thirds of the artists whose work has been accepted into the Eden archives, some 90 paintings in total as can be seen in the EPFS book A Coming of Age.

Mally organised a number of exhibitions in Cornwall for her art groups, the most recent commemorated the Heligan gardeners who died in the First World War by showing the flowers, vegetables and animal life with which they would have been familiar. She also had her own work shown nationally and internationally.

Most recently her painting of Babington’s Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var.babingtonii) was used by the Association of British Botanical Artists as the poster image for the Worldwide Botanical Art Day in the Peter Scott Gallery at Lancaster University. The original was also displayed at the RHS Show in London where it was purchased by Dr Shirley Sherwood for her Collection.

Soon after this she was diagnosed with cancer and she died in April 2019.