Botanical Illustrations Research Articles

Amazon Journeys and Poetic Re-Discoveries in Jan Conn’s 'Jaguar Rain' and Malu de Martino’s 'Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua'

The year 2023 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of botanical artist Margaret Mee’s final expedition to the Amazon. On this trip, she was at last able to paint the rare night-flowering of Selenicereus wittii, commonly known as the Amazon moonflower. Such an accomplishment was not only significant due to the rare nature of the event, but also because it was the final piece created by an artist who renewed the practice of botanical painting. Originally from Britain, Mee lived in Brazil for more than thirty years, embarking on fifteen expeditions to the Amazon region between 1956 and 1988, painting while travelling in dugout canoes deep in the forest and becoming a fervent activist for the protection of the environment. Her work has influenced many artists, e cologists, and biologists, and has served as inspiration for literary and filmic creations. In 2006, Canadian poet Jan Conn published Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems, in which she poetically recreates Mee’s journeys to the Amazon. As both a scientist and a poet who has also extensively travelled in the region, Conn reimagines Mee’s wondrous encounters while situating them as part of a tradition of travel and exploration in South America. A few years later, in 2012, the documentary Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Malu de Martino, was premiered. In the film, Martino reconstructs Mee’s final journey to the Amazon in search of the moonflower while also reinstating the artist’s important contributions as an artist, environmentalist, and contemporary explorer. The connections between the biographical, poetic, artistic, and professional Mee are closely woven throughout the documentary, which can be seen as inserted in a new documentary tradition, less analytical and more poetic, in which notions of truth, history, and reality are problematised and rendered through different lenses. Bearing in mind that both Conn and Martino re-read Mee’s journeys through the tropes of exploration and discovery, which are commonly associated with imperial practices and colonial narratives of the New World, in this paper, we propose to discuss in which ways these tropes are brought into context and problematised, especially in relation to the depiction of Amazonian nature.

Gymnostachyumcalcicola (Acanthaceae), a new species from limestone karst of Peninsular Malaysia.

A new species, Gymnostachyumcalcicola Rafidah, sp. nov. (Acanthaceae) is described from limestone karst in Peninsular Malaysia. Characters distinguishing it from related species, colour photographs, botanical illustration and provisional conservation status are provided.

Picturing the flora of China

Abstract This paper traces the provenance of some 2,400 plant paintings obtained by early British commercial travellers to Xiamen 廈門, long pre-dating the later ‘export trade’ in Chinese botanical art. Nine principal sets of paintings form five ‘assemblages’ across the British Library and Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville, Virginia. Each painting, in one of two styles, depicts a single plant labelled with its Chinese name. The first style (‘boneless’) either deploys limited outlines to denote form or lacks outlines altogether, and incorporates resemblances to traditions of bencao 本草 (materia medica) illustration and huaniaohua 花鳥畫 (flower-and-bird) painting. The second uses prominent inked outlines and more firmly resembles bencao illustrations. Two merchants, James Cuninghame and Christopher Brewster, are identified as purchasers of some paintings, and their acquisitions entered the metropolitan collections of James Petiver and Sir Hans Sloane. A single Chinese actor, ‘Dr Bun-ko’, is named in an annotation on 309 ‘Bunko–Brewster Paintings’ which have newly been shown to encompass holdings at the British Library and Oak Spring.

Subjective Nature

Science, thought and art meet within the limits of reality, in how reality is understood and represented.. This is where the art-techne binomial materialises graphics, which in turn facilitate the faithful or fictionalised reproduction of our environment. The vocation of science is to advance explanations of the world through a supposedly objective gaze, and the vocation of art is to broaden this understanding by evoking other sensitive and unexpected perspectives. Given the historical relationship between printmaking and the dissemination of knowledge in all fields and the natural sciences in particular, we would like to present the graphic derivations of a collaborative experience between a printmaking artist-cum-researcher and a researcher in forestry science. The experience: A multidimensional approach to the plant: An art and science project started at the end of 2021 when the author, Antía Iglesias, an art student from the interdisciplinary PhD programme in Creativity, Social Innovation and Sustainability (Universidade de Vigo, Spain) (Fig. 1) collaborated with another student, Marion Boisseaux, a PhD student in Tropical Ecology (Université de Guyane) during a research stay in French Guyana. The two students began a joint project to analyse and represent tropical tree seedling species (that Marion had selected in her DRYER project, which observed the effect of drought due to climate change) using their respective technical, numerical and graphical languages, and to provide multiple representations of the plants. This paper aims to present this common experience through the description and analysis of the process that was followed, from a botanical illustration to obtaining graphic digressions from these plants. We will now focus on the derivations obtained from the digital biomimetic record, laser engraving, and printing experimentation.

Reestablishment of Zamia lawsoniana (Zamiaceae, Cycadales), an endemic species of Mexico, with first description of the ovulate strobilus

Background and Aims: Zamia, with 86 species, is the most diverse Neotropical cycad genus. In Mexico, 18 species occur, of which 15 are endemics. These taxa are distributed from sea level to 1200 m a.s.l. Recently, the phenology of Zamia in wild populations from southern Veracruz and Tabasco was studied to evaluate the morphological patterns of reproductive structures. While these records have been considered as Z. loddigesii, a species with a wide distribution along the Gulf of Mexico, different populations do possess morphological differences. Based on these data, we reevaluated the synonymy of Z. lawsoniana, which was described in 1884 and synonymized with Z. loddigesii in 1995. Methods: Botanical material was collected from three populations in Tabasco, ten in Veracruz and two in Oaxaca previously considered part of Z. loddigesii. Reproductive structures were measured at maturity in habitat. Populations were visited during 2022 and 2023 to record reproductive phenology. Herbarium specimens of Zamia lawsoniana and morphologically similar species (Z. loddigesii, Z. spartea and Z. stenophyllidia) were examined. A morphological description and an illustration for Z. lawsoniana were prepared. In addition, an identification key that included related species in terms of morphology, geography and phylogenetics was made. Key results: Zamia lawsoniana is removed from synonymy and some taxonomic clarifications are made. In this context, we provide a complete description of pollen strobili, including the microsporophylls, range of vegetative morphological variation, and a botanical illustration. Additionally, the ovulate strobilus is described for the first time and a preliminary conservation status is proposed. Conclusions: Based on morphological evidence of reproductive structures and vegetative characters, we propose the reestablishment of Zamia lawsoniana and its removal from synonymy with Z. loddigesii.

BUTLER, Patricia. Drawn from nature. The flowering of Irish botanical art

BUTLER, Patricia. <i>Drawn from nature. The flowering of Irish botanical art</i>

To Press, Dry, Organise, and Represent

Abstract This paper examines the epistemological relation between two types of scientific image produced during a botanical expedition to New Granada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: herbarium sheets and botanical illustration. Visual analysis of an exceptional collection of these two types of documents brings to light how scientific ideologies were transferred from Europe to New Granada, during the transformation of this latter from a colony to a republic. This study shows how features such as composition, proportion, and pictorial technique derive from both aesthetic choices and epistemological necessities. It reveals the development of a codified visual language resulting from a highly organised and structured outcome, complying with Carl Linnaeus’ principles of classification, and materialising a new way of looking at plants based on Isaac Newton’s universal mathematical principles.

Phenological coding of Crambe abyssinica Hochst. according to the BBCH system

AbstractCrambe (Crambe abyssinica Hochst.) is an oilseed crop domesticated in the Mediterranean region that is becoming increasingly important worldwide. Crambe is now considered as an alternative to bioenergy crops and oleochemicals, because of its ability to acclimatise under inhospitable conditions. Despite the interest in the agronomic characteristics and applications of this crop, research on crambe is still scarce and has focused only on production, taking into account the phenological stages of this species. Therefore, a single criterion for quantifying the phenology of the species can be a useful tool for both researchers and growers. In the present study, a proposed scale of the phenological growth stages of crambe was applied according to the BBCH (Biologische Bundesanstalt, Bundessortenamt und Chemische Industrie) coding system. The phenological stages were described using the one‐ and two‐digit decimal coding of the BBCH system and corresponded to stage 0: germination; stage 1: leaf development; stage 2: lateral sprout formation; stage 5: inflorescence emergence; stage 6: flowering; stage 8: fruit ripening and stage 9: senescence. Growth stages 3 and 4 (main stem elongation and development of collectable vegetative parts, respectively) have been omitted. Figures have been included to illustrate the main stages, and plant growth has been represented by a technical botanical illustration. The BBCH system has been effective in providing phenological data on crambe, allowing for better growing management of the crop under varying climatic conditions, as well as contributing to the standardisation of research methods on the species.

Women botanical-illustrators and their successors in the Israeli culture: merging historical heritage with contemporary art

ABSTRACT Exploring the flora and fauna of the land of pre-state Israel stood at the heart of the Zionist venture. Zionist institutions took efforts to educate the Jewish population, trying to connect it to the land by learning it. This involved various ways of familiarising children and adults with their surroundings, with botanical illustration as an important agent working for that cause. This article aims to examine the three botanical women illustrators who contributed significantly to Israeli science and art, followed by three contemporary women artists whose art is inspired by them. Using a methodology combining visual analysis with the artists' interviews, it will be demonstrated how botanical illustration of the past is embedded in contemporary art. Both share a perception of plants as crucial elements populating the planet, and as objects of aesthetic investigation. These perceptions have led to various attitudes: first, exploring the plant in nature and observing it thoroughly throughout the artistic process. Second, the image created remains botanically identifiable, thus echoing a scientific approach. Third, the plant's Hebrew name is sometimes included. The noticeable inspiration of historical illustrators for contemporary artists lies both in the choices of the images themselves and in the practice of creating them.

More-than-Human Wellbeing

More-than-Human Wellbeing

Study on the Genus Plectranthus (Lamiaceae) in Java: P. verticillatus, a captivating new alien species

Plectranthus (Lamiaceae) is a popular ornamental plant all over the world. The study of the genus Plectranthus in Java was considered complete after the publication of Flora of Java Vol. II. Many authors, however, have reported the presence of numerous alien species on the island in recent years. The aim of this research is to provide current information on Plectranthus in Java, particularly the newly recorded alien species. The study was carried out using the free exploration method in the provinces of Banten, Jakarta, West Java, and East Java. We reported the first occurrence of P. verticillatus (L.f.) Druce in Java in this paper. The species is a succulent herb native to Southern Africa that has grown in popularity as an ornamental plant throughout the world. It is a newly discovered alien species to the Alien Flora of Java. The species appears to have escaped cultivation, with spontaneous populations found in Jatihandap and Cipadung, both in Bandung City. We also reported that P. verticillatus is the only member of Plectranthus found in Java in a recent taxonomic study. There is a description, photographs, botanical illustrations, and a brief discussion.

Participatory Inquiries That Promote Consideration of Socio-Scientific Issues Related to Sustainability within Three Different Contexts: Agriculture, Botany and Palaeontology

The involvement of students in dramatised inquiries, through participatory activity, offers opportunities to act in-role as scientists. The inquiries can ‘set-the-scene’, provide context and challenges for students to consider possibilities within and beyond everyday life. This approach can engage students in thinking about sustainability and developing citizenship competencies, such as thinking scientifically and critiquing ideas, interrogating evidence and assessing the validity of information, as well as decision making and problem solving. In this paper, adopting stories from the history of science is shown to provide rich, authentic contexts that engage students imaginatively and collaboratively in addressing past, present and future socio-scientific issues. To demonstrate how the approach can be adapted we drew on the work of three scientists: an agriculturalist; a botanist and a palaeontologist. Their scientific work informed the learning activities of several primary science lessons (with students aged 9–10). The agricultural activities were informed by the work of George Washington Carver and were related to improving soil quality through crop rotation as well as thinking about the diversity of food and other products that can be produced from plants. The botanically informed activities promoted understanding about processes linked to maintaining species diversity. These drew on the work of Marianne North, a Victorian botanical artist, noted for her detailed plant observations. The final socio-scientific context was related to the work of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19th century palaeontologist, who made significant fossil discoveries that contributed to the understanding of geology and evolution. Interactive and participatory activities, informed by the lives and work of these scientists, were designed to engage students in socio-scientific inquiry-based learning through a drama-based pedagogy. These dramatised inquiries promoted the development of scientific citizenship competencies. Scrutiny of data collected through multiple methods suggested that, by extending opportunities for learners to participate in these dramatised lessons, understanding sustainability became more salient for the students. Outcomes suggest several distinctive affordances offered by dramatisation when supporting understanding about sustainability and the development of scientific citizenship.

Absence of botanical European Palaeolithic cave art: What can it tell us about plant awareness disparity?

Societal Impact StatementCave art has been an integral part of human history, providing a glimpse into the lives and cultures of our ancestors. Prehistoric botanical art is an important medium that can help us to redefine our intimate relationship with plants. The findings from our work provide some evidence from the European Palaeolithic period that modern plant awareness disparity (PAD) might be more deeply rooted in our past. By inspiring a deeper appreciation and understanding of the natural world, cave art can help people to reconnect with plants, thus tackling PAD.

Madame Davit: Gaudir de la natura: La il·lustració botànica des de la perspectiva de gènere

Suzanne Davit (Paris, 1897 – Barcelona, 1973) is little known and studied, despite the relevancy of her legacy to the Catalan botanical illustration of the early and mid-20th century. Great botanists such as Pius Font i Quer greatly valued her unique way of capturing nature. As a woman and an artist who was passionate about nature and who was also scientifically very curious, her representation of plants was different from the typical work of the time. Her innovations are interpreted as an alternative artistic discourse to the dominant patriarchal dialogue and a manifestation of the female touch. Access to unpublished documents – Davit's correspondence with a friend – has made it possible to reconstruct some of the key aspects of her work, involving the crossroads between the aesthetic exaltation of flowers and a gender perspective.

On Contemporary Botanical Art

Botanical art travels from various historical forms into a contemporary approach that calls for a bold redefinition of its practice. This article aims to introduce the reader to the general context of botanical art production today, and to its core new facets, mirroring environment, education, and new understanding in creative industries. Its relevance lies in its capacity to connect the wide public to general core climate and environmental debates; also botanical art is called to raise awareness on the interconnectivity of higher education sectors that whiteness the dissolution of their (de)limitations by hybrid new age creative approaches.&#x0D;

Botanical Illustration and Byzantine Visual Inquiry in the Morgan Dioscorides

Standard art historical narratives portray early medieval and Byzantine botanical illustration as a stagnate tradition resulting from the uncritical copying of ancient models. The Morgan Dioscorides, however, testifies to robust critical practices in Byzantine botanical illustration as early as the ninth or tenth century ce. In this article I argue that the makers of the Morgan Dioscorides critically compared variant pictures from the same manuscript tradition. They drew upon nature observation and close readings of text to create illustrations absent from the existing tradition. I further explore the theoretical and empirical underpinnings for these practices.

History, evolution, and current status of botanical illustrations in Sri Lanka

History, evolution, and current status of botanical illustrations in Sri Lanka

Distribution and conservation of vanilla crop wild relatives: the value of local community engagement for biodiversity research

Natural vanilla is a high-value crop with demand increasing globally. Crop wild relatives (CWR) represent valuable agrobiodiversity and are prioritized in the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. Vanilla species are naturally rare with historically infrequent botanical collections. Despite their importance as CWR, fewer than 10% of Vanilla species have been evaluated for the IUCN Red List. Colombia is a diversity center for Vanilla species, yet many remote regions are lacking detailed floristic characterization. We show that the participation of rural communities in scientific endeavor enhances capacity to register biodiversity. We report two Vanilla species in the under-explored region of the Serranía de las Quinchas in the mid–Magdalena River valley in Colombia, including the first report for Colombia of Vanilla karen-christianae. For this, and the second species, Vanilla dressleri, we present descriptions with photographic botanical illustrations, updated distribution maps, and preliminary conservation status assessment. Both species are of elevated conservation concern, categorized as Endangered – EN: B2a,b(ii,iii,iv,v) following IUCN criteria. Within Colombia, all recorded occurrences for both species fall outside protected areas. Vanilla crop wild relatives in Colombia have urgent conservation needs. The Serranía de las Quinchas is a priority for further botanical exploration for Vanilla, as well as other protected areas with appropriate habitat. In situ conservation should be complemented with ex situ actions. Community participation in biodiversity research is recommended in this and other remote regions as an integral step towards enhancing biodiversity research and community-based conservation.

The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) by Valerie Derbyshire

Reviewed by: The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) by Valerie Derbyshire Rachael Isom THE PICTURESQUE, THE SUBLIME, THE BEAUTIFUL: VISUAL ARTISTRY IN THE WORKS OF CHARLOTTE SMITH (1749-1806), by Valerie Derbyshire. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019. 316 pp. $63.00 hardcover; $56.00 paperback; $99.00 ebook. As the field of Charlotte Smith studies has flourished over the last several decades, this versatile Romantic-era writer has been explored through numerous literary and historical roles: amateur botanist, prolific novelist, leading figure of the sonnet revival, and woman poet admitted to the exclusive boys' club of High Romantic versifiers. In The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Valerie Derbyshire recasts Smith once more by tracing her relationships to key visual artists of the late eighteenth century and analyzing her skillful use of popular artistic tropes to achieve narrative innovation and social critique. Such an approach frees Smith from familiar comparisons to William Wordsworth and company, instead placing her within an artistic coterie that includes contemporary portraitists George Romney and James Northcote, alongside lesser-known figures like Smith's childhood drawing master and a father-daughter pair of engravers who influenced Smith's later thinking about art as social commentary. By recreating these historical exchanges, Derbyshire's book presents Smith's fiction (and a sampling of her poetry) as fundamentally interdisciplinary and deeply engaged in discussions of gender, labor, class, and politics in the late eighteenth century. This line of inquiry considers aesthetic theory—from the conventions of botanical illustration to the major artistic categories in Derbyshire's title and even to the rules of English heraldry—as more than a set of visual cues; in Smith's writing, such tropes form "a mode of interpretation as well as a means of representation" (p. 4). Derbyshire thus highlights not only Smith's artistic literacy but also her imaginative uses of artistic language to create narrative instabilities and expose social ones. The capaciousness of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and the heft of Smith's oeuvre make for a daunting critical combination, but Derbyshire manages this union with an effective organizational scheme, frequent historical grounding, and coherent movement between the sister methodologies of visual analysis and close reading. After an introduction that pairs a few elegiac sonnets with contemporaneous botanical drawings, each subsequent chapter explores an aesthetic concept with reference to a representative artist Smith knew and a particular novel Smith wrote. [End Page 343] For example, chapter two uses Smith's connection to George Smith of Chichester, a practitioner of picturesque landscape drawing and Smith's own childhood drawing master, to explain how the superficially pleasing forms of the picturesque unsettle social expectations in Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle (1788). Lest this structure seem formulaic, Derbyshire admits overlapping themes in Smith's fiction and sometimes leaves the trope-artist-novel chapter model to highlight an artistic school or tradition. Notable such deviations occur in chapter five, which explores the influence of John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, and chapter six, which traces heraldic imagery in Celestina (1791). Across Derbyshire's monograph, readings of Smith's novels appear alongside plentiful images—many in color—that illuminate the sharing of aesthetic ideas across creative disciplines in the Romantic age. Indeed, Derbyshire's method of pairing novelistic scenes with paintings underlines the sense that "Smith accesses these artistic tropes in order to aestheticise her own fiction and question the very nature and reliability of storytelling itself" (pp. 271-72). Derbyshire's innovative claim for the novel as a principal vehicle for Smith's project of aestheticization expands recent critical conversations, which have tended to emphasize poetry as the site of nature imagery and aesthetic principle in Romantic literature. This generic shift and its attendant discussion of realism distinguish Derbyshire's research from foundational work by Smith scholars like Stuart Curran and Jacqueline M. Labbe; these new approaches also necessitate that Derbyshire treat characters—not just landscapes—as aestheticized elements in Smith's novels. The book accomplishes this unconventional handling of character with varying degrees of success. For instance, the Romney and Northcote portraits cited...

Kallstroemia hageri (Zygophyllaceae), a new caltrop from Baja California, Mexico

A new species in the genus Kallstroemia (Zygophyllaceae), K. hageri Rebman, endemic to the Baja California peninsula is described here for the first time. It is similar to K. peninsularis D.M. Porter in having retrorse pubescence on its stems and pedicels, but differs in its smaller flowers, shorter fruit beak, shorter pedicels, and fewer leaflet pairs per leaf. This new species occurs mostly in the midpeninsular region and ranges from the Sierra de La Libertad in the southern part of the state of Baja California south to the vicinity of Cerro Mechudo in the southern Sierra de La Giganta of Baja California Sur. A botanical illustration and a key to the species in the genus Kallstroemia from the Baja California peninsula are also presented.