“Towards the latter end of November, 1860, a proposal was made to organize a Botanical Society. There being no such Institution in operation in Canada, it was thought that much benefit might result from its establishment.”

So begins the first volume of the Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada, published in 1861 following the Society’s founding in Kingston, Ontario in 1860.

The Botanical Society of Canada’s botanical garden at Queen’s College, Kingston. Queen’s University Archives V28-B-Summ-2.1.

The Society—founded by members of the Queen’s College (now Queen’s University) natural history department—welcomed men and women as equal members and met regularly in Kingston. One hundred people attended the first meeting in January 1861, despite temperatures of –20 Celsius! The following month, 200 people were in attendance, including a young woman named Catharine (Kate) Crooks. She joined the Society on that occasion, along with her brother-in-law, Alexander Logie. Crooks and Logie had travelled from Hamilton, Ontario—southwest of Toronto—and presented the Society with a flora of Hamilton.

Undated Daguerreotype portrait of Catharine McGill Crooks. Robert Milne, Hamilton, Ontario.

This flora included several plant species Crooks recorded in the southwestern Ontario communities of Cambridge, London and St. Thomas, and their presentation was accompanied by a large collection of specimens (roughly 500!) prepared by Crooks. The following year, Crooks’ collection was exhibited in London, England, as part of the official Canadian display at the International Exhibition of 1862. She received an Honourable Mention for her herbarium of native Canadian flowers, shrubs and trees.

Crooks documented several rare species native to Canada’s Carolinian ecozone, such as Andromeda polifolia, Liatris cylindracea, and Lupinus perennis. In fact, her observations captured a record of southwestern Ontario’s flora before the landscape changed forever. Today, some parts of southwestern Ontario have only 12.1% forest cover, and its wetlands are much-reduced, due to agriculture, urban sprawl, and aggregate extraction [1].

While the Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada offers a tantalizing glimpse into Crooks’ contributions to the documentation and study of southwestern Ontario’s flora, her name is all but unknown today. Those details that are recorded in the Annals’ pages, however, inspired librarian Anna Soper’s quest to learn more about this elusive woman in science.

Anna Soper, librarian, artist, writer. Photo credit: A. Soper.

The sole librarian operating a small, special library in Kingston, Ontario, Soper has a personal interest in botany and environmental history. This interest was further nurtured by her discovery of the Biodiversity Heritage Library while obtaining her Master of Library and Information Science degree. Whilst exploring the Annals in BHL, she was introduced to Crooks—and was both intrigued and baffled by what she read.

“I asked myself, ‘How come I’ve never heard of Kate Crooks?’,” recalls Soper. “She lived and worked in Ontario in the same era as Catharine Parr Traill—arguably Canada’s most prominent nineteenth-century naturalist. In fact, Crooks and Logie published their flora years before Parr Traill published her 1868 text Canadian Wildflowers. Parr Traill’s book was subsequently praised as ‘one of the greatest botanical triumphs which anyone could achieve.’ So what happened to Crooks’ specimens? How could her legacy have been so forgotten?”

Motivated by these unanswered questions, Soper began an intensive personal research project on Crooks, but found that very little of Crooks’ life and work appeared to have survived the years since her death.

“Sadly, not a single piece of her original (ca. 1860) collection has turned up,” shares Soper. “I contacted many curators who said they just don’t have complete records of their herbarium collections, so it is hard to assess whether any of Crooks’ specimens might be in their care.”

Eventually, Soper was able to locate a single botanical specimen attributed to Crooks—a pressed cutting of Sabatia angularis held in the collection of McGill University Herbarium. While this specimen is mentioned in a 1982 publication, Atlas of the rare vascular plants of Ontario, it might have been mis-catalogued when it was added to Canadensys (a database for Canadian biodiversity data), where it is attributed to an “M. Crooks”. Upon receiving a photo of the specimen and its label, Soper realized that what had been interpreted as an “M. Crooks” was actually a “Miss Crooks”.

A specimen of Sabatia angularis, pressed by Miss Crooks in 1865. This native plant is now extirpated from Ontario. Photo credit: Dr. Frieda Beauregard, McGill Herbarium, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

Since then, Soper has continued to piece together more of Crooks’ story, which she shared in an article for Atlas Obscura last year. Sadly, Crooks died at the young age of 38, eight days after the birth of her third child. She is buried in Hamilton, where, in 1865, she is believed to have collected the only known Ontario specimen of Sabatia angularis—a native plant now extinct in that province.

Thanks to Soper’s research, Crooks’ legacy is now emerging from the shadows of obscurity under which it had fallen over the past century. BHL played an important role in making this happen.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library kick-started my research on Kate Crooks, and I know that without this valuable resource it would have been much harder to work on this project,” asserts Soper.

Soper’s interest in BHL’s collections extends beyond her research on Crooks. She regularly uses the Library, either to browse the image collections or to retrieve some piece of information for her other research interests.

“The sheer variety of botanical illustrations and natural history texts in BHL is what initially sparked my interest in the collection,” recalls Soper.

BHL offers many services that facilitate Soper’s research and reuse of the collections—particularly full text search and the availability of DOIs for many titles. She also appreciates BHL’s efforts to curate and provide context to its materials, such as through its image collections on Flickr and themed social media campaigns.

Soper regularly posts content from BHL to her own Twitter feed (@Flora150Project), where she explores botanical subjects around folklore, scientific illustration, and local flora. In fact, it was her activity on Twitter that first led her to the Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada, and by extension Kate Crooks.

“I originally began my Twitter page in 2017, during Canada 150, the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation,” explains Soper. “I planned to create a flora of Kingston, and started posting photos from rambles around the city. I turned to BHL’s catalogue to see whether I could find an earlier example of Kingston’s flora, and that’s what led me to the Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada.”

Anna Soper. Detail from A Flora of Kingston, 2018. The series featured digital and analogue photographs of Kingston’s flora, layered over blank sheets from the Smithsonian Field Notes collection. In 2018, Soper exhibited photos from A Flora of Kingston as part of a temporary public art installation created by the City of Kingston. Whilst creating A Flora of Kingston, Soper discovered that a teenage member of the Botanical Society of Canada had published his flora of Kingston in the Annals. This gave her an historic precedent with which to compare her work. As Soper shares, “I was pleasantly surprised to find some of the same species he had recorded, including two plants (Rubus odoratus and Staphylea trifolia) in the same wooded area in which he found them!”

More recently, Soper’s interests have turned towards phenological records — specifically, calendars of flora. Published in 1762, Miscellaneous tracts relating to natural history, husbandry, and physick… includes two calendars of flora—one recorded in Norfolk, England, and the other, in Uppsala, Sweden.

“Each calendar dovetails with the other; evoking a sense of time unfolding from one season to the next,” shares Soper. “There’s also a rather poetic quality in the writing.”

For example, one entry, from September 1755, reads almost like a haiku:

1. 21. SWALLOWS gone. Full moon. 
   22. Autumnal æquinox. 
   23. WOOD LARK… sings.

There was a useful function to these calendars. According to the Swedish calendar, May 13th was “The best time for sowing barley, and the seeds of garden plants.” Since the Wheat Ear (Oenanthe spp.) had recently arrived from its winter home, it was unlikely any further frosts would follow.

Shortly after the world went into lockdown, in the winter of 2020, Twitter user @VenetiaJane posted a prompt for her followers: “Please share your favourite nature-related photographs, poems, quotes…Let’s spread a little #joy and #positivity around the world at a time when we all really need it.’” The hashtag #SolaceInNature was born.

“At the time—mid-March—not much was blooming where I live; just a few willow catkins on a tree near my home. So I turned to the Biodiversity Heritage Library for content,” explains Soper. “Using the hashtag, #CalendarOfFlora, I have been posting these centuries-old documents on my Twitter feed. In fact, a calendar of flora lends itself to sharing on social media, since you can match the content with that day’s date!”

On April 1, 1755, Alex Berger saw signs of spring: “Moss…sheds its dust”, he wrote. By the 3rd, Berger saw stones loosened from the ice. On the 6th, “Hills begin to appear, the snows being melted,” and serpents came out of their holes. #CalendarOfFlora #OTD #SolaceInNature pic.twitter.com/W4c5FpAj2U

— Anna Soper (@Flora150Project) April 1, 2020

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“People are finding new ways to relate to each other—and the world around us—at this time,” remarks Soper. “Since I could not contribute much #SolaceInNature at the start of this crisis, I turned to the work of others; keeping vigil with their words as they, too, waited for spring.”

Anna Soper. Detail from A Flora of Kingston, 2018.

With centuries of knowledge captured within its pages, the annals of natural history are a rich resource for anyone interested in exploring the natural world. As Soper’s experience shows, any turn of a page could inspire new and unexpected discoveries. We are proud to work with a global network of partners to ensure that anyone, anywhere can be empowered to feed their curiosity, uncover the history of natural history, and be inspired by biodiversity.

“Since I’m outside of academia, I have no opportunities to take time off for research and writing,” shares Soper. “Online, open access resources like the Biodiversity Heritage Library are crucial to piecing together a story like Kate Crooks’, while giving me much-needed leads for in-person research in my spare time.”

Anna Soper. Detail from A Flora of Kingston, 2018.

References

As the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has revolutionized global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth. BHL’s digital collections provide researchers with the information they need to document Earth’s species, conserve biodiversity, research the history of science, and confront formidable challenges — from extinction crises to climate change and the spread of zoonotic diseases.

Digital access to this essential literature is especially important right now, as the COVID-19 pandemic makes physical access to collections and institutional libraries impossible for many. Open access digital libraries like BHL make continued research possible.

Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Paleobiology, has been a longtime user of and advocate for BHL. The historic data accessible through publications in BHL underpins much of his work. For example,  the Discovery Reports, which present the results of groundbreaking investigations into the biology of whales, helped inform Pyenson’s studies on the evolution of cetacean body size and whale hearing.

Dr. Nicholas Pyenson at Cuverville Island, Antarctica. Photo credit: Martha Stewart.

While BHL has been a valued resource for Pyenson for many years, digital access to scientific literature has become especially important as research has shifted to a telework environment.

“As a researcher, the Biodiversity Heritage Library gives me the opportunity to seek and find scientific literature especially from home, during this pandemic — that’s something so valuable to me, when I’m far away from the Smithsonian Libraries’ many branches and deep storage archives,” emphasizes Pyenson. “Access to words, images, and ideas that are either decades or centuries old drives so much of my work. It also gives me a sense of connection to people I’ve never met, but nonetheless seem very real for the questions I want to answer.”

Pyenson shares more about BHL’s impact during these unprecedented times on the Smithsonian Libraries’ YouTube channel.

As our understanding of the natural world deepens and grows, trusted, openly available resources become ever more important. BHL’s Secretariat and technical staff, together with our colleagues at BHL’s over 80 partner institutions globally, are committed to ensuring continued access to BHL resources for researchers around the globe. Your support today is deeply impactful to our ability to continue providing support to the thousands of researchers who rely on access to our digital collections.

If you’re able to give, we welcome your contribution.

Peacock. A Natural History of Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, and Insects (1845). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. Downloaded from the BHL Flickr.

Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture the natural world and share it with broader audiences through reproduction via woodcuts, engravings and etchings, and lithography in natural history publications. Even today, scientific illustration is important, articulating morphological, physiological and anatomical features with more detail and clarity than can often be captured through photographs.

With more than five centuries of natural history literature, the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s open access collections include millions of scientific illustrations amongst the Library’s nearly 60 million pages. Since 2011, BHL partners have worked to upload many of these illustrations to Flickr. Recent publicity from a myraid of outlets including Colossal, My Modern Met, Open Culture, Atlas Obscura, Lifehacker, and Vice has generated wide public interest in BHL’s Flickr collections, which in 2020 included over 180,000 images freely available to browse, download, and reuse. The images are curated by volume and searchable by subject and, in many cases, scientific names thanks to tags added as part of our Flickr tagging citizen science project.

These illustrations are useful for communities in a wide range of disciplines. Our audiences have shared how they use these illustrations to support studies in the sciences, such as identifying the earliest observations on heterostyly in plants, researching the history of herbaria, and revisiting the legacy of women in science. Citizen scientists make use of these resources on platforms like Wikipedia and to research the identities of natural history artists.

Given that these illustrations are works of art, it’s not surprising that these collections are also providing a wealth of inspiration for artists like Dee Etzwiler, who recently used BHL images within nine pieces she created for a group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020.

Dee Etzwiler’s artworks incorporating BHL imagery, delivered for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. Photo credit: D. Etzwiler on Instagram.

Photo by: Eric Merrow | @MerrowVisuals (www.merrowvisuals.com)

“As an artist, BHL offers a wealth of imagery for me to explore and discover,” affirms Etzwiler. “The images are abundant in number and are superb in beauty, diversity and quality.”

With a background in art and a master’s degree in architecture, Etzwiler combined her skills to found her own commercial art firm in 2012, where she works collaboratively with clients to create custom artworks. While most of her work is client driven, Conversations gave Etzwiler an opportunity to create a body of work driven by her own interests and influences.

It was while conducting image research in 2019 for these artworks that Etzwiler first discovered BHL.

“I had decided to create a number of pieces to represent different adjectives that describe conversations,” explains Etzwiler. “While conducting research, I discovered a scorpion image on the BHL Flickr that became central to one of my pieces. This was the first BHL image I started to seriously digitally manipulate, and the piece quickly developed into an exciting work. I decided that my entire body of work for the Conversations group show would revolve around BHL inspiring images.”

Scorpion image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library which Etzwiler incorporated into her artwork, ‘Stinging’ (2019). Plate CCLIII. Die Arachniden, Bd. 8-10 (1841-43). Contributed in BHL from the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Downloaded from the BHL Flickr.

‘Stinging’. Artwork by Dee Etzwiler for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. © Etzwiler 2019. Reproduced with permission from D. Etzwiler.

When looking for BHL imagery to incorporate into her art, Etzwiler starts by conducting searches in the BHL Flickr by common name, scientific name, and other related words so that she can uncover a wide range of potential images with which to work. Once she selects an image, she downloads a full size file and imports it into a Photoshop file where she layers it with textures, images and colors to develop her artwork. Once completed, the art is commercially printed, making use of a variety of printing substrates — fine art paper, metal, acrylic, wood, canvas, fabric, and more.

‘Colorful’. Artwork by Dee Etzwiler for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. © Etzwiler 2019. Reproduced with permission from D. Etzwiler.
  Incorporating artwork from BHL: Peacock. A Natural History of Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, and Insects (1845). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. Downloaded from the BHL Flickr.

BHL has made incorporating these historic illustrations into her own artworks extremely easy.

“I love how easily I can search the images in Flickr and how well the images are organized and displayed,” asserts Etzwiler. “I love that I can view images in greater detail and download them in a variety of sizes and resolutions. Having access to copyright information is very important, too. It was so much fun to create this body of work, and I am grateful that I committed to this idea.”

‘Valuable’. Artwork by Dee Etzwiler for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. © Etzwiler 2019. Reproduced with permission from D. Etzwiler.
Incorporating artwork from BHL: Plate XXXVII. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. Downloaded from the BHL Flickr.

Etzwiler enjoyed her experience working with BHL images so much, she intends to continue to use these collections in her pieces. In fact, this experience has had a deep impact on her artistic interests and the future direction of her work.

“My work with BHL’s images has greatly increased my interest in creating science-related art, which has now become a focus of my work as I move forward,” shares Etzwiler. “With the current coronavirus pandemic, I will be focused on this science-related work in my studio. I know that BHL assists those in the science community, but it has also made a big impact on my life as an artist and I am grateful.”

‘Long-Winded’. Artwork by Dee Etzwiler for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. © Etzwiler 2019. Reproduced with permission from D. Etzwiler.
Incorporating artwork from BHL: Pl. 141. Ichthyologie, v. 1 Plate (1796). Contributed in BHL from the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Downloaded from the BHL Flickr.

BHL’s open access digital library portal allows anyone to freely access valuable literature and beautiful images from anywhere — even at home and when access to physical collections is not possible. We’re grateful to our global partners for making their collections freely available — empowering research, learning, and creativity, no matter where you are.

Thank you to Dee Etzwiler and others in our global community for letting us know how valuable and inspirational BHL’s collections are in so many ways and for so many people.

‘The Gathering’. A patchwork of pieces from the original 8 images created by Dee Etzwiler for the group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020. The original 8 pieces represent conversation types, so this large piece represents a hypothetical social gathering.
© Etzwiler 2019. Reproduced with permission from D. Etzwiler.