The Eloise Payne Luquer Medal is awarded for special achievement in the field of botany that may include medical research, the fine arts, or education. The interpretation of the award is to be elastic and imaginative.

Ms. Luquer was a botanist, naturalist, lecturer, and wildflower painter, fittingly called the “Audubon of Wildflowers.” Her wide-ranging interests encompassed founding the first District Nursing Association in the U.S., the Nature Trail at the Poundridge Reservation, and teaching gardening to the women at Bedford Hills Reformatory and Prison. The medal was designed in 1949 by sculptor Chester Beach and presented and endowed by Bedford Garden Club, Bedford Hills, New York, in memory of their distinguished member, Eloise Payne Luquer. Previous recipients include botanist and medical researcher John Nash Ott (1963), horticulturist, conservationist, and author Dr. E. Lucy Braun (1966), artist and writer Cherie Pettit (2005), and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (2007).