A Curious Herbal, the first modern edition of Elizabeth Blackwell’s 18th-century botanical guide, grants her the recognition that she has long deserved.
Botanic
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Lina Puerta’s Art Mimics Botanical and Female Anatomical Forms
Puerta’s artworks strike a gentle balance between whimsy and sincerity.
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A Book Gathers Botanical Sketches from Across the Centuries
Botanical Sketchbooks is a compendium of the diverse ways plants have been observed, studied, and immortalized in centuries of art.
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Rediscover a 19th-Century Compendium of North American Trees
Botanists François-André Michaux and Thomas Nuttall documented every known tree in North America. A new book compiles over 270 plates from their original publication.
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The Early-20th-Century Photographer Who Magnified the Alien Beauty of Plants
Using a homemade camera, Karl Blossfeldt captured the sculptural details of plants, from the geometry of a seed pod to the alien curl of a fern.
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A Compendium of Shakespeare’s Plants, from Juliet’s Rose to Ophelia’s Bouquet
The book Botanical Shakespeare, by historian Gerit Quealy with illustrations by Sumié Hasegawa-Collins, compiles the roughly 175 mentions of plants in Shakespeare’s plays.
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Why a Herbarium of 7.8 Million Plants Is One of New York’s Most Valuable Resources
The New York Botanical Garden is home to the world’s second-largest herbarium, a vital archive in an era of vanishing botanical collections.
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Casting New York City’s Oldest Tree in Luminous Glass
Artist Rachel Owens made casts of the Alley Pond Giant, the oldest living thing in New York City, and fused them with a rainbow of glass shards.
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Mark Dion Reimagines a Pioneering Botanist’s Lab
The former winter home of Dr. David Fairchild in Miami now houses a permanent installation that Dion extrapolated from the botanist’s life and work.
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An Artist Who Cultivates Deadly Plants and Photographs Them
Matthew M. Kaelin takes pictures of carnivorous plants to highlight their beautiful and fatal details.
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The Uncanny Nature of Fake Flowers
The 73 photographic plates in Robert Voit’s The Alphabet of New Plants each frame a different floral detail, from bursting blooms to twisting branches.
Posted inArt
An Interactive Map of a Midcentury Botanist’s Amazonian Trips
Richard Evans Schultes took peyote with the Kiowa in Oklahoma in the 1930s, was the first scientist invited to a hallucinogenic yagé ceremony in the Amazon’s Sibundoy Valley in the 1940s, and inadvertently helped launch the psychedelic era of the 1960s.
