Botanical artistry

Today's imperative: stop surfing and start strolling through the collection of lovely botanical prints posted at the University of Delaware's The Art of Botanical Illustration site (link courtesy of iconomy, via Reflections in d minor). The categories in this curated collection include Herbals, Travel & Exploration, Scientific Botany, Women Artists, Modern Botanicals, and...of special interest to those of us who are, not to put too fine a point on it, seed-heads at this time of year...Seed Catalogs.

Botanical art is irresistible to me, whether in an elegantly framed-and-matted limited edition lithograph or a mass-produced poster on the walls of a fast-food burger place. Good news: secondhand stores, rummage sales, import stores and discount stores all seem to have an abundance of botanical prints these days at prices that don't seem to be more than what you'd pay for the frame. Interestingly, the increasing popularity (and ensuing mass availability) of botanical styles in the market doesn't diminish their aesthetic appeal to me one bit. In fact, I'm hopeful for the day that everybody else gets so sick of botanical stuff that I can finally afford to add to my Portmeirion collection (currently consisting of a single serving bowl, decorated with Helleborus niger, received as a wedding present almost thirteen years ago).

To my mind (or to my eye), botanical drawings seem to capture the identity and essence of a plant better than photographs. (Alas, I have no art-historiographical linguistic tools to explain why I think that is, so please bear with me.) Interesting case: Margery Fish's Carefree Gardening. It includes both line drawings (mysteriously uncredited) and black-and-white photos (credited to Pat Brindley). The line drawings are terrific; the photographs show the plants, but fall flat. I do think that it's very hard to convey proportion in the "right" way (I don't want to say "accurately", since photographs are almost always "accurate"), and somehow hand illustrations tend to do better justice to the dimensions of what you see when you look at a plant than many photographs. I also find that drawings (particularly line drawings) seem to do a better job of capturing the texture of foliage, with the effect of elevating the visual impact of foliage to a level deservedly on par with the otherwise diva-like blossom.

I've enjoyed the botanical cover art on Cook's Illustrated for so long that it's clearly time to start a rotating display of the covers in the kitchen. The back cover of the latest issue is titled "Stalks and Shoots," featuring delicately colored illustrations of harvested celery, rhubarb, artichoke, asparagus, cardoon, fiddlehead fern, fennel, and lemon grass. No, it's not too early to start dreaming about summer.

Carefree Gardening. Margery Fish. Faber and Faber Limited, 1989 reissue. ISBN 0-571-115325-9.

Comments

[Kathy]

Funny you should mention botanical prints. I just hung my very first wallpaper border in our bathroom. It is from a Waverly book entitled "The New York Botanical Garden: A Visit to the Garden," and is "derived from Les liliacées, illustrated by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, botanical illustrator of the18th and early 19th centuries, and published in France in 1802." (quote is from the wallpaper book.) To see what it looks like, go to http://www.decoratetoday.com/products/wallpaper/product_detail.asp?gensearchby=1&ptn=DTC24472055&prid=611150&stype=&flagback=&si=5 . They also had a border with seed packets in that same book, which was available at both Lowe's and Home Depot last time I looked.

[Kathy]

Have you seen this botanical art of another kind? http://www-personal.umich.edu/~agrxray/

[Bookish Gardener]

Mmmm, Redouté...and now my accent aigu problem is solved -- I'll just cut and paste it from your comment! ;D

The radiological art is fascinating. I think my faves are the honesty and the lisianthus.

Thanks for the great links!

[bill]

I have field guides with photos and ones with drawings. I find the ones with drawings much more useful because they show off better the features that I need to see to make identifications, like leaf veining for example.