Botanical Illustrations Research Articles

<p><strong>Taxonomy of <em>Sisyrinchium</em> sect. <em>Cephalanthum</em> (Iridaceae: Iridoideae) in Southern Brazil</strong></p>

Here we present a first contribution to the taxonomic revision of Sisyrinchium (Iridaceae: Iridoideae) for Southern Brazil. Sisyrinchium sect. Cephalanthum is one of the six sections in which the Brazilian species of the genus are classified, and the second largest in number of taxa. This monograph presents the taxonomic treatment of 22 taxa characterized by a unique set of morphological and molecular features, assigned to the section by phylogenetic studies, as well as the unplaced S. elegantulum, which is included here due to morphological similarity. A new status and a new synonym are proposed, and nine lectotypes and one neotype are designated. An identification key is provided, and species are described, accompanied by botanical illustrations, pictures, and distribution maps. In addition, geographical distribution, habitat, phenology, notes, and examined specimens are presented. Species of the section are mainly distributed in the South American biogeographic dominions of Chacoan and Parana.

Taxonomy of the Genus Halophila Thouars (Hydocharitaceae): A Review.

The seagrass genus Halophila Thouars has more than twenty described species and is predominately distributed over a wide geographic range along the tropical and the warm temperate coastlines in the Indo-West Pacific Oceans. A brief history of the Halophila taxonomic development is presented. Based on reproductive and vegetative morphology, the genus is divided into eight sections including three new sections: section Australes, section Stipulaceae and section Decipientes. A rewritten taxonomic description of the type species for the genus Halophila, H. madagascariensis Steudel ex Doty et B.C. Stone, is provided. The lectotype of H. engelmannii Asch. as well as neotypes of H. hawaiiana Doty et B.C. Stone and H. spinulosa (Br.) Asch. are designated. Furthermore, H. ovalis ssp. bullosa, ssp. ramamurthiana and ssp. linearis together with H. balforurii have been recognised as distinct species. Nomenclature, typification, morphological description and botanical illustrations are presented for each taxon. Recent molecular phylogenetic surveys on certain Halophila taxa are also discussed. Field surveys for the deep water Halophila in West Pacific regions are suggested. Morphological studies combined with molecular investigations for the Halophila on the east coast of Africa and the West Indian Ocean are urgently needed and highly recommended.

Revisiting the taxonomy of the Neotropical Haemodoraceae (Commelinales).

Based on extensive herbarium, field, botanical illustration, and molecular phylogenetic research, five genera and eight species are recognised for the Neotropical Haemodoraceae. New taxa include Cubanicula Hopper et al., Xiphidium pontederiiflorum M.Pell. et al. and Schiekia timida M.Pell. et al. Two new combinations are made, Cubanicula xanthorrhizos (C.Wright ex Griseb.) Hopper et al. and Schiekia silvestris (Maas & Stoel) Hopper et al. We also correct the author citation for Xiphidium, provide the necessary typifications for several names and present an updated identification key, comments, and photo plates for all species. Finally, we provide high-quality illustrations for most of the recognised species and their diagnostic characters.

Charles Parish – Plant Hunter and Botanical Artist in Burma by Dudley Clayton. 2017, Ray Society, London. 278 pp., 148 colour plates, 26 photos, 6 maps. ISBN 978‐090‐3874502 090‐, 3874504. £85.00.

Curtis's Botanical MagazineVolume 37, Issue 4 p. 476-478 Book Review Charles Parish – Plant Hunter and Botanical Artist in Burma by Dudley Clayton. 2017, Ray Society, London. 278 pp., 148 colour plates, 26 photos, 6 maps. ISBN 978-090-3874502 090-, 3874504. £85.00. Phillip Cribb, Phillip CribbSearch for more papers by this author Phillip Cribb, Phillip CribbSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 February 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/curt.12363Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue4December 2020Pages 476-478 RelatedInformation

The Engler Medal in Silver Awarded to DR. Terry Pennington and MS. Rosemary Wise

The Engler Medal in Silver is awarded for an outstanding monograph or other work in systematic botany, mycology or phycology and honors the legacy of Adolf Engler (1844–1930) in these disciplines. The Engler Medal in Silver was first awarded in 1987, at first annually, and since 2007 biennially. The 2020 Medal, for a work published in 2017–2018, has been awarded to Terry Pennington and Rosemary Wise for: “The Genus Sloanea (Elaeocarpaceae) in America”, DH Books, Milbourne Port. 447 pp. (2017). Terry Pennington has had a long and productive career studying Neotropical forests, mostly in Mexico and Peru, but also anywhere in between, producing several monographs and field guides working for the Food and Agriculture Organization and The New York Botanical Garden. Since 1999 he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Rosemary Wise has been a prolific botanical artist documenting a wide variety of plant groups for several researchers for over 50 years. She is a recipient of the Jill Smythies Award from the Linnean Society of London for published botanical illustrations and the Sibthorp Medal from the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford for “Lifetime Services to Botany”. Terry and Rosemary have collaborated since the 1960s when she did the illustrations for his dissertation, and that has not stopped since, with works on Sapotaceae, Meliaceae, Inga (Fabaceae), the trees of Peru and many important botanical topics. We hope to be able to present him with the medal in person as soon as we can.

Indian Art and European Science: Patnakalam and Colonial Botanical Drawings

This paper seeks to explore how scientific documentation fuelled by Enlightenment and indigenous art intermingled to create Patnakalam in nineteenth century India. Patnakalam, a school of painting that flourished in Patna, Bihar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, came into existence with the complex interactions between an indigenous artistic tradition and a western visual sensibility mediated by the requirements of science. Botanists of the East India Company employed native artists to make illustrations of local plant species in an attempt to scientifically catalogue all of the natural resources of the region. This inevitably contributed to the formation of a style of painting which went on to have an enduring legacy far beyond their taxonomical albums.

At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camellia in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisition, assimilation and dissemination of colonial knowledge in River of Smoke (2012). The paper highlights the cultural exchange of botanical and horticultural knowledge between Europe and China in the nineteenth century narrativized by Ghosh. The novel illustrates the significance of non-Eurocentric modes of conserving knowledge that would otherwise suffer from the violence of utilitarian models of European epistemology. The paper explicates how Ghosh represents the Chinese as successful in ensuring that the Golden Camellia – a rare flowering variety in China – is preserved from falling prey to the profiteering logic of botanical expeditions and epistemic hegemony by European naturalists. Using Pramod Nayar’s imperial cosmopolitanism and Robert Proctor’s agnotology as critical frames, the paper maps Ghosh’s fictional representation of Chinese horticulturists using botanical illustration to disable Europeans from accessing the Golden Camellia. By circulating the nonexistence of the plant variety as the truth, the Chinese horticulturalists in the novel prevent the Golden Camellia from being usurped and profiteered by European botanists and plant traders. The paper also establishes how Ghosh’s work functions as a significant addition to works foregrounding the South-South connection in the South Asian literary imagination.

The orchids of John Henry Lance (1793–1878)

John Henry Lance, a British barrister, spent a ten-year term in Surinam as Judge appointed to the ‘Mixed Court’ in Paramaribo, a post created to supervise the compliance of the Dutch authorities with a treaty signed between the Netherlands and England in 1818 prohibiting the slave trade in the Dutch colonies. During his term in Paramaribo, Lance, a friend of Bateman and Lindley, collected several new orchid species. However, his collection of watercolors depicting plants from Surinam, many of them orchids, would appear to be more important. Some of these were painted by himself, others by the Surinamese artist Gerrit Schouten. The orchids of this collection, never published, were supplied by the Lindley Library of the R.H.S. and are reproduced here with its kind permission.
 Key Words: botanical illustration, history of botany, Orchidaceae, Surinam

PUBLISHING NATURE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS: JOSEPH BANKS, GEORG FORSTER, AND THE PLANTS OF THE PACIFIC

AbstractThe construction and distribution of books containing large copperplate images was of great importance to practitioners of natural history during the eighteenth century. This article examines the case of the botanist and president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who attempted to publish a series of images based on the botanical illustrations produced by Georg Forster (1754–94) on Cook's second voyage of exploration (1772–5) during the 1790s. The analysis reveals how the French Revolution influenced approaches to constructing and distributing works of natural history in Britain, moving beyond commercial studies of book production to show how Banks's political agenda shaped the taxonomic content and distribution of this publication. Matters were complicated by Forster's association with radical politics and the revolutionary ideologies attached to materials collected in the Pacific by the 1790s. Banks's response to the Revolution influenced the distribution of this great work, showing how British loyalist agendas interacted with scientific practice and shaped the diffusion of natural knowledge in the revolutionary age.

The botanical illustrations of Franz Scheidl (fl. 1770–1795)

Franz Scheidl created approximately 800 botanical illustrations published in Vienna as coloured copperplate engravings in Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin's Hortus botanicus Vindobonensis and Florae Austriacae icones between 1770 and 1778. Johann Jacob von Well's unpublished “Phytanthologia eikonike”, an illustrated manuscript intended as a kind of florilegium and produced between 1768 and 1780, consists in part of plant illustrations based on living specimens, in part of incomplete copies of pre-existing images; these are also by Scheidl's hand. Another manuscript, “Pflanzen Blumen und Früchte”, held by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library in Upperville, Virginia, to date incompletely known and possessing similar characteristics, has also been ascribed to Scheidl; its contents are analysed here. These materials help to understand the work of a botanical illustrator and copyist working in the late eighteenth century.

Methods of Using Vellum in Botanical Illustrations

Methods of Using Vellum in Botanical Illustrations

Supplementing forestry field instruction with video and online dynamic quizzing

AbstractPlant identification is a critical skill for students in biological sciences, especially forestry. Many students begin with limited plant identification abilities and struggle to learn this skill. To support student learning of identification and ecological characteristics of important forest plants in an undergraduate forest ecology course at the University of British Columbia, I developed 53 videos, a companion website, and a dynamic quizzing system. The professionally produced, short videos each featured identification and ecological characteristics of a plant species, filmed in the field. The companion information website contained the embedded videos, botanical drawings, photographs, and general information for each species. The online, dynamic practice‐quizzing system allowed students to select which species they wanted to be quizzed on. Questions about those plants were then dynamically generated following several question templates, enabling students to take many practice quizzes with few or no repeated questions. Students were surveyed to gain insight into usage patterns and opinions of these resources. Student feedback was positive, and all three resources were heavily used. The videos are publicly available and have more than 43,000 views. Although this project required significant time and financial resources to produce, I found that field instruction can be supported by optional online resources that are both appreciated and heavily used by students.

Editorial Committee for Memorial Publications on the 80th Anniversary of Makino’s Illustrated (ed.): The Collection of Makino Botanical Illustrations

Editorial Committee for Memorial Publications on the 80th Anniversary of Makino’s Illustrated (ed.): The Collection of Makino Botanical Illustrations

In the shadow of black turban: Semiotic transformation of floral motif in 17th-century Dutch art

This article deals with the investigation of floral still-life in 17th-century Dutch painting and the special meaning of tulips in such works. The author points out the problem of the unique position of this flower in the every-day life and its place in the Dutch economy and the system of cultural and aesthetic values. The paper investigates botanical drawings of flowers as well as flower still-lifes and history paintings, which could be interpreted profoundly when one takes into account the meaning of tulip.

"Tropicale". Uwikłane piękno

Tropicale: Difficult beautyThe University of Warsaw Botanic Garden has a collection of over 30,000 illustrations depicting plants, which were compiled by a famous Polish cleric Władysław Michał Zaleski 1852–1925, Archbishop and Apostolic Delegate of East India. This collection, entitled Flore Tropicale, is based mostly on illustrations from European botanical publications, but it gathers tropical plants from all continents. Digitalization and historical works on the collection contributed to the implementation of the artistic project in the form of a book titled Tropicale. The book refers to the classic style of botanical albums while also playing with this convention. Botanical illustrations have been juxtaposed with other archival materials left by Archbishop Zaleski, which come from his never-published Stories for Polish Youth. To combine this content, the book uses Japanese binding and hides a second, parallel story in its inner pages. This text describes the artistic and conceptual frameworks of the project in terms of book layout, images selection and editing as well as the context of botanical expeditions employed by Zaleski.

Images of Wild Flowers in Israeli Visual Culture: Representations of a Troubled Land

Abstract This article examines images of wild flowers in Israeli visual culture from the period of pre-state Israel until the present day. These images have served as “cultural objects” that have helped construct a national identity. They have appeared in Hebrew publications, stamps, banknotes, and artworks. Arguing that the choice of botanical art is a political statement, this article shows the complex attitudes embodied in contemporary wild flower images—both thematic and stylistic—in which the artists negotiate their multifaceted relationship with the Land of Israel as a troubled territory. The images created by Israeli-Jewish artists share a twofold significance: they stand as naïve memories of Israel’s early years and, at the same time, they embody the reality of conflict implied in the idea of sharing the Land with the Israeli Arabs. The methodology of this article is interdisciplinary, as it integrates an analysis of visual images with the use of interviews and the explication of texts.

The Illustrated Dioskourides Codices and the Transmission of Images during Antiquity

AbstractA parchment codex of the early sixth centurya.d., now in Vienna, contains a remarkable series of nearly 400 full-page illustrations of individual botanical species. These illustrations accompany an alphabetical recension of a pharmacological treatise on the medicinal properties of plants written by Dioskourides of Anazarbos, a Greek author of the first centurya.d. Both the date of the codex and the style of its botanical illustrations have encouraged suggestions that the latter were modelled somehow on classical archetypes. This article presents new observations in support of the classical archetypes theory, but questions the traditional view that these archetypes were transmitted by ‘illustrated texts’ or ‘pattern books’ executed in papyrus or parchment. What follows is a new hypothesis concerning the nature of the artistic intermediaries used by painters, mosaicists and sculptors during antiquity.

Painting Prophecy

AbstractThis article examines the work of the Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez, who created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that consists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico. Rodriguez’s Codex draws on pre-Hispanic, colonial, and Chicana/o/x antecedents, most notably the Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) and the Chicana/o/x codices of the early 1990s, produced in the context of the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage. This article posits Rodriguez’s Codex as a polyphonic text that exceeds both the linguistic of the literary and the visual of the artistic, drawing on a multiplicity of sources, both historical and contemporary, visual and textual, oral and aural, in her mapping of California’s land and history. The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón collapses precolonial, colonial, and contemporary histories to underscore continuities between the ruptures of conquest and our dangerous geopolitical moment.

A Scottish daughter of Flora: Lady Charlotte Murray and herherbarium portabile

A collection of 267 late-eighteenth-century miniature botanical illustrations, painted in Perthshire, Scotland, by Lady Charlotte Murray (1754–1808) is described. The drawings are arranged according to the Sexual System of Linnaeus in a specially adapted box. The scientific and social context of the collection is discussed, including the role the cards may have played in relation to a botanical card game housed in a companion box of educational games also created by Lady Charlotte. Her place in the history of the discovery of the Scottish Highland flora is discussed, as is her influence on the botanical activities of her nieces Lady Charlotte Menzies and Lady Amelia Drummond.

Interview with Lucinda Law: Finding inspiration in plants—The life and work of a botanical artist

Interview with Lucinda Law: Finding inspiration in plants—The life and work of a botanical artist