Botanical Sketchbooks is a compendium of the diverse ways plants have been observed, studied, and immortalized in centuries of art.
Botanic
Posted inBooks
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.
Posted inBooks
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.
Posted inBooks
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.
Posted inArt
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.
Posted inArt
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.
Posted inArt
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.
Posted inArt
An Artist Who Cultivates Deadly Plants and Photographs Them
Matthew M. Kaelin takes pictures of carnivorous plants to highlight their beautiful and fatal details.
Posted inBooks
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.
Posted inBooks
A Tribute to New York’s Wilting Flower District
If cities had such things as official botanicals, New York City’s might be the flower bouquet.
Posted inArt
The First Woman Photographer Captured the Elegance of Algae
Algae is graceful and light in the ocean, swaying with the waves like hair in the wind.