Frances Wilmot Currey was born at Lismore Castle, County Waterford on 30 May 1848. She was the daughter of Anna and Francis Edmund Currey. Her father was employed as a land agent to the dukes of Devonshire, and was an early, accomplished photographer.
She went on to became a daffodil cultivator at Warren Gardens, Lismore later in life. As she got older, Currey began to concentrate on gardening, professional bulb growing in particular. She was owner of the Warren nursery and gardens in Lismore, which specialised in daffodils.
Edith Somerville recalls Currey"s resistance to a proposed local authority drainage scheme that could destroy her daffodil plots by sitting on a wall with a shotgun.
Around 1900, Currey collected two colour forms of wood anemone, Lismore Blue and Lismore Pink, which are still cultivated today. She noted that blue forms of wood anemone always grew within close proximity to water, and was the recorder of the only Yellow Bartsia found in County Waterford.
Currey was a supporter of Women"s suffrage, was the organist in Lismore cathedral, and was a keen fisher, shooter, woodworker, sculptor, and made mosaics. She wrote a fairy tale Prince Ritto or The four-leaved shamrock, published in 1877, with illustrations by Helen Sophia O"Hara, who lived with her from 1898.
Currey died at her home, the Mall House, Lismore, on 30 March 1917.
A founding member of Ireland"s first amateur drawing society, the Water Colour Society of Ireland, Currey was widely exhibited in Ireland and Britain. She was an active member of the group, involved in all of their activities, and was involved in the hanging of the 1878 exhibition at the Athenaeum, Cork. Currey had a successful career exhibiting in England, showing her work at the Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and the Society of Women Artists, she became an appointed member of the latter in 1886.
Currey was elected a member of the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland in 1901.
