All posts tagged with botany

BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic was invited to participate in a symposium, hosted by JSTOR Global Plants, at Botany 2018 in Rochester, MN entitled The Future of Digital Projects for Research & Teaching in Botany.

The symposium addressed questions such as: what existing digital projects in botany have been successful and how did they become so; what areas of need should future projects explore; how do we define success for digital projects; how do digital projects directed at students differ from those aimed at the researcher; how can we use digital projects to reach new students and interested lay people; and how are new digital projects funded and supported for the long term.

“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

It is a glimpse into a lush diversity of the past….and into possibilities for a resilient future. The Herefordshire Pomona is a classic in the science and practice of pomology. Compiled and edited by the eminent 19th century horticulturalist Robert Hogg and the physician Henry Graves Bull, who moonlighted as an enthusiastic amateur naturalist, the Pomona was an outgrowth of efforts by the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club to record and showcase the different varieties of apples and pears found in the orchards of Herefordshire, a county in the West Midlands region of England.

Dr. Gregory Peck, an Assistant Professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University, has been assessing a large number of apple genotypes for their potential use in hard cider production. Through this work, he has discovered inconsistencies between many U.S. varieties and their original counterparts. He recently teamed up with Dr. Gayle Volk at the United States Department of Agriculture to uncover the truth behind these enigmatic cultivars.

“We employed DNA fingerprinting tools to confirm our suspicions that these were misnamed cultivars,” explains Peck. “But now we’re left with a mystery. What are the misidentified cultivars?”

As it turns out, it’s a mystery that the Biodiversity Heritage Library can help solve.

The National Agricultural Library (NAL), Special Collections has one of the world’s largest collections of nursery and seed trade catalogs totaling over 200,000 from American as well as international companies. This collection, representing businesses located in all states plus over 50 countries, was named after its long-time curator, Henry G. Gilbert. The earliest catalog is from William R. Prince & Company dated 1771. NAL continues to collect modern-day catalogs.

Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

The Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden has received over $200,000 from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded to the Chicago Horticultural Society for the conservation and digitization of 62 rare and unique “language of flower” books published in the 19th century. The Lenhardt Library has been a BHL Affiliate since 2014.