This quarter, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was pleased to welcome The Arboretum Library at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden as its newest Affiliate. The BHL consortium, which has grown substantially over the past year, now consists of 17 Members and 16 Affiliates.

The Arboretum Library holds an extensive collection of books, magazines, government documents, pamphlets, and audio-visual materials covering a wide range of topics, including gardening and garden design, plant lore, medical botany, botanical art, ethnobotany, California native plant life, and Mediterranean-climate botany.

Twenty-four magazine titles published by the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden are already available through BHL as a result of The Arboretum Library Good Family Foundation Digitization Project, a collaboration between the Arboretum, BHL, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The publications, dating back to the 1950s, include information about the institution’s history, Los Angeles area horticulture, and research conducted by Arboretum staff. The articles have been indexed for author, title, date, and subjects (including people and plant names), all of which are searchable.

The articles in the Arboretum publications have both a scientific and popular appeal. For example, among the many interesting topics covered is the history of coffee, which Leonid Enari explores in the June 1976 issue of Lasca Leaves.

According to the article, coffee was used as food at least by 800 AD, but the “habit of coffee drinking seems to have started in Arabia in the 15th century” (Enari 1976). The first beverages created from the berries of the coffee plant were likely alcoholic, made from the pulp of the berries. It is unknown when the practice of roasting the seeds (beans) and using them to prepare today’s familiar coffee beverage was discovered, but its consumption in Europe was popularized through coffeehouses that were often regarded, particularly in England, by the church and state as “centers of political agitation.”

Leaves and berries of Coffea arabica. Enari, Leonid. “Coffee.” Lasca Leaves. v. 26 (1976). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41846781. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden. CC-BY-NC-SA.

The Arabian coffee tree (Coffea arabica) is used for the majority of the world’s commercial coffee production. The all-important coffee beans are the seeds of the coffee plant (found inside the plant’s fruit) which have been dried and roasted. After being roasted and ground, coffee will lose most of its aroma and flavor within 10 days. You can learn more about the history of coffee and its commercial production in the Lasca Leaves article.

The existing and future contributions from the Arboretum Library will provide valuable access to information about the history of botany and horticulture, botany in Southern California, and the Arboretum’s impact on these research areas. We look forward to working with our newest Affiliate to enhance BHL’s collections and expand our service to the global botanical, horticultural, and wider research communities.

Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus). Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. v. 62 (1835). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/465887. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

‘Queen of the dark, whose tender glories fade
In the gay radiance of the noon-tide hours.’

‘That flower, supreme in loveliness, and pure
As the pale Cynthia’s beams, through which unveiled
It blooms, as if unwilling to endure
The gaze, by which such beauties are assailed.’

These elegant lines are quoted in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (v. 62, 1835) as part of the description for the Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) and serve as an artful conveyance of the species’ nocturnal blooming. But these lines represent more than just a whimsical representation of plant behavior. They are a reflection of the eighteenth century Poetic Botany movement that saw botany become the subject of poetry.

The Poetic Botany movement began with Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, who, in 1789, published The Loves of the Plants, a poem that in essence was a versification of Linnaean botany, where each plant in the garden is personified as a Greek god or goddess whose characteristics and interactions are meant to elucidate the Linnaean sexual system of plant classification. This highly successful poem was eventually republished along with a second poem by E. Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation, in 1791 as The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts, thus launching a movement that was proliferated by such authors as Frances Arabella Rowden, Charlotte Smith, and Robert John Thornton.

Frontispiece for the Digital Exhibition Poetic Botany: Art and Science of the Eighteenth-Century Vegetable World (2016). Credit: Ryan Feigenbaum.

Selenicereus grandiflorus is one of nine species featured in the online exhibition Poetic Botany. Using these plants as a lens through which to highlight the Poetic Botany movement, the exhibition introduces the botanists and works that constituted this period. These botanists were concerned with not just the art of their verse but also with the scientific study of their plant subjects, and thus the Poetic Botany movement reflects a beautiful union of art and science.

Ryan Feigenbaum at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Credit: Madeline Chera, 2016.

The Poetic Botany exhibition was created by Ryan Feigenbaum as part of a 2015-2016 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Humanities Institute of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden. NYBG, a founding BHL Member who has contributed over 3.9 million pages to the BHL collection, hosts the exhibit.

Feigenbaum, who has a BA in philosophy from DePaul University in Chicago, an MA in philosophy from Villanova University, and is currently completing a PhD in philosophy at Villanova University, researches the history and philosophy of biology. As evidenced through Poetic Botany, this research eventually led him down a botanical path.

“My dissertation, ‘The Epistemic Foundations of German Biology, 1790–1802,’ analyzes the emergence of biology as a science by tracing the genealogy of the organism concept,” explains Feigenbaum. “I came to the history of botany as an offshoot of this project; specifically, I was interested in the eighteenth-century opinion of plants, i.e., their ontological status. Whereas plants had long been regarded as devoid of intelligence, sensitivity, and locomotion, naturalists like Erasmus Darwin began to challenge these views, spurred on by the ‘discovery’ of plants like the Drosera and Mimosa pudica that challenged longstanding prejudices.”

Feigenbaum’s interest in the “life sciences” and the history of botany grew naturally out of his research on philosophy, for these two subjects have historically been intimately connected.

“The separation of philosophy and science is a relatively recent phenomenon,” affirms Feigenbaum. “Descartes, for instance, contributed to mathematics and physics beyond his cogito ergo sum, and much of Aristotle’s corpus focuses not on metaphysics or ethics but natural science. In this vein, I’ve been committed to studying not only eighteenth-century philosophy, but also its life science for the past five years or so. I say ‘life science’ because biology did not yet exist; the word ‘biology,’ in fact, was not used in its modern meaning until 1802. The how and why of biology’s emergence at this time is one focus of my dissertation.”

It was this extension into the ‘life sciences’ that eventually brought Feigenbaum to BHL.

“As my study of the history of philosophy incorporated more and more of the study of the history of science, BHL became a resource I relied on time and again,” asserts Feigenbaum. “At first I would search via Google for a particular eighteenth-century text, but I found it so often on BHL that I ended up using its website portal directly, sparing me the trouble of having to sift through Google results.”

BHL played an important role in the development of Poetic Botany, allowing Feigenbaum to discover and access relevant texts, many of which are linked from the exhibit.

“BHL provides smart access to knowledge that wouldn’t be otherwise available,” lauds Feigenbaum. “My favorite feature is the ability search by species. Since the digital exhibition is organized around species, this ability revealed new sources of which I’d been unaware. It is quite amazing that you can instantly see in which texts a species like Canna indica appeared according to date and then be taken to the exact pages of the reference. Without this resource, my workflow would have been much slower; it would’ve required me to visit multiple archives and search through texts one by one. While such an approach isn’t without its benefits, it inevitably limits what the researcher can do and extends the time required to do it.”

American bog plants: eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), yellow pitcherplant (Sarracenia flava), and Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula). Thornton, Robert John. New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus. (1807) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/307056. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

While there are many texts featured in Poetic Botany, one of Feigenbaum’s favorites is John Thornton’s New Illustration of the Sexual System. According to Feigenbaum,

“This perennial favorite is often acclaimed for its indisputably beautiful illustrations, perhaps some of the most iconic in existence. However, the accompanying text is also marvelous, giving the reader insights into eighteenth-century botany, snippets of poetry, and whole disquisitions on culture, religion, and other topics.”

This title is also consistently a favorite among BHL’s online audiences. Thanks to the citizen science efforts of Michelle Marshall, this entire work has also been taxon tagged in Flickr, making it easy for you to identify and search for the species contained within it.

We encourage you to take some time to explore Poetic Botany and marvel at the elegant and profound union of art and science represented in the exhibit and texts. Who would have thought that poetry and science could fit together so naturally?

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This post may contain the personal opinions of BHL users or affiliated staff and does not necessarily represent the official Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) position on these matters.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we would like to highlight a field book that documents Native American knowledge of natural resources. The field book was created by William J. Fisher, who lived in southern Alaska from 1879 until his death in 1903.

Fisher’s notebook documents his final years collecting and looks at the relationship between the Alutiiq (Aleut) and their plants by recording medicinal and food uses for 48 specimens. Only a handful of the specimen entries include the taxonomic names of plants; instead, entries focus on recording the Russian and Sugpiat/Alutiiq names of plants, how the plants were used, and plant distribution. Detail varies, as seen below in entries three and forty-seven.

Entry three describes Fritullaria kamschathensis [Fritillaria camschatcensis], also known as the Kamchatka Fritillary, and lists general use and preparation: “Used as an article of food by natives. The bulbs are boiled mashed and after a liberal supply of seal or whale oil has been thoroughly mixed therewith, it is put away for winter’s use.”

Specimen entry three from “Notes accompanying collection of useful plants made by W. J. Fisher at [Kodiak] in 1899,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA Acc. 12-038. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/46428854. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Image of Fritillaria camschatcensis from Encyclopedia of Life, provided by Biopix. http://eol.org/data_objects/19162439.

Entry forty-seven for Ledum palustre [Rhododendron tomentosum], also known as Northern Labrador Tea (also pictured below), takes up an entire page describing the plant’s habitat, the appearance of its flowers, and multiple local medicinal applications: “(1) As a tea it is freely drunk in alleviating the hacking cough of consumptives. (2) As a gargle in sore throat. (3) Administered as tea it is efficacious in relieving asthmatic complaints.”

Specimen entry forty-seven, from “Notes accompanying collection of useful plants made by W. J. Fisher at [Kodiak] in 1899,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA Acc. 12-038. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/46428831. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Image of Rhododendron tomentosum (Northern Labrador Tea), from Encyclopedia of Life. Image by Biopix. http://eol.org/data_objects/19183248.

Fisher’s ethnographic focus while collecting plants is clear. The field book provides detailed information regarding local names and knowledge, but leaves out basic information often found in botany field books like date and detailed locality information. This lack of information may relate to a note Fisher wrote on the title page: “dried plants with Mr. Kearney, alcoholics in seed collection.” “Mr. Kearney” was Thomas Henry Kearney (1874-1956), a botanist with the Bureau of Plant Industry at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Kearney was in Alaska to work with Frederick Coville from April 1898 – August 1899, and along the Northwest Coast from Puget Sound to the Bering Strait in 1899. He then served as a member of the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899.

It is unclear how the two men became acquainted. Fisher had a relationship with the Smithsonian Institution; Coville as a USDA employee worked with Smithsonian, and perhaps he introduced the two. Whatever the reason, Kearney’s field notes for his work in Alaska are also available on BHL through the Smithsonian Field Book Project, and they provide a tantalizing overlap in content and geographical coverage.

A field book at the end of a collecting career

Fisher’s field book is also interesting because it document’s his collecting focus and interests as they evolved over a lifetime. Fisher’s initial scientific interest was in marine biology. During the 1870’s he was a curator of conchology at the California Academy of Sciences and served as a marine biologist for the U.S. Fish Commission on several cruises in the Pacific headed by William Healey Dall.

In 1879, Fisher accepted a position as tidal recorder in St. Paul, now known as the city of Kodiak, Alaska. After accepting the position, he wrote to Dall, who was affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, and offered to collect natural history specimens. The offer was accepted, and Fisher was instructed that the museum was also interested in ethnographic artifacts from the region.

The town of St. Paul where Fisher settled was originally established by the Russians as a center for fur trading. By the time Fisher arrived, it was a town of approximately 500 residents, primarily of Russian and Native Alaskan heritage. According to an article in Arctic Anthropology (no. 1, 1992) the community was still significantly mixed regarding the adoption of European culture in terms of religion, language, and beliefs.

Fisher initially focused on collecting natural history specimens, but as he began to correspond with Smithsonian’s Secretary Spencer Baird, his interest and collecting shifted to ethnography. He even began to commission works by Native Alaskans. Fisher’s main source of income was his position as tidal recorder; Smithsonian was frequently unable to finance his work. This lack of funding apparently did not dim Fisher’s enthusiasm, but it did lead to financial hardship. During an extended collecting trip to Bristol Bay in the summer of 1885, his assistant successfully petitioned for Fisher’s job. Fisher’s collecting came to an end by the 1890’s; the ethnobotany field notes document the end of his work with the Smithsonian Institution.

Interested in learning more? We encourage you to learn about the William J. Fisher collection at the National Museum of Natural History, which was highlighted as part of a book Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People, in the online exhibit featuring artifacts created by the Alutiiq people and collected by Fisher during his years in Alaska.

Other resources include:

Aron L. Crowell, 1992, Postcontact Koniag Ceremonialism on Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula: Evidence from the Fisher Collection. Arctic Anthropology 29(1):18-37. Retrieved on November 16, 2016 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316240?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Highlights of the William J. Fisher collection at the National Museum of Natural History: http://naturalhistory.si.edu/arctic/features/fisher/collect.html

The field books of William Healey Dall, available on Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/search?searchTerm=Dall+%22field+notes%22#/titles

Field Book Project blog post by Sonoe Nakasone: http://nmnh.typepad.com/fieldbooks/2012/02/sharing-culture-through-plants.html

All over North America, there are organizations that study, preserve, and promote local flora. Called by various names, these organizations fall under the umbrella term “native plant societies.” While they are independent from one state or province to the next, and while some may have a particular focus, such as wildflowers, they have many similarities: their membership is comprised of professional botanists and amateur enthusiasts; they conduct surveys and field research focusing on a specific geographic region; they are actively involved in conservation; and they usually publish a newsletter to keep members apprised of society activities.

Calypso Orchid, Calypso bulbosa. Photo by Gerry Queener. Sage Notes, v.34, no.3 (2012)

Through the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, BHL has received permission for the newsletters of several native plant societies and chapters:

• The Arkansas Native Plant Society
  • Claytonia

• The California Native Plant Society
  • East Bay Chapter
    • The Bay Leaf
  • Kern Chapter
    • Mimulus Memo
  • Mt. Lassen Chapter
    • The Pipevine

• The Colorado Native Plant Society
  • Aquilegia

• The Delaware Native Plant Society
  • The Turk’s Cap

• The Idaho Native Plant Society
  • Sage Notes

• The Illinois Native Plant Society
  • The Harbinger

• The Wyoming Native Plant Society
  • Castilleja

Just as native plant societies share many similarities, so do their newsletters. They typically contain updates about society-sponsored events and meetings, brief features on a particular plant group or biodiverse area, and occasionally tips for identification and cultivation. They also contain pertinent information about conservation initiatives and the kinds of administrative information common to all organizational newsletters. But the most valuable portion of each newsletter, from a biodiversity perspective, is surely the field trip summary. Field trips are a central activity of all native plant societies.

Turtle Mountains, Mojave Desert. Photo by John Game. The Bay Leaf, January 2016

While original botanical research is typically associated with books and peer-reviewed journals (and some societies do publish their own journals), these newsletters are a goldmine of information about rare plants and the ecologically sensitive areas where they’re found; over the years, repeated field trips to these areas reveal trends in the health and abundance of plants, in the same way that Christmas bird counts document changes in avian populations.

Pogonia ophioglossoides from Rosina Cox Boardman’s Lilies and Orchids (1906), Pl. XVII

For example, the Fall 1981 issue of Claytonia documents the discovery of several rare plants that hadn’t been seen in Arkansas in over 30 years, including the Rose Pogonia orchid, Pogonia ophioglossoides.

Another example: The Harbinger v.30, no.3, contains an account of how a glacial prairie came into possession of the local township after its owner–a farmer who had used the land to graze cattle–passed away. Plans for a baseball field and parking lot were scrapped when the land was found to contain rare plants like Hill’s Thistle (Circium hillii) and Prairie Buttercup (Ranunculus rhomboideus). The article describes efforts by Illinois Native Plant Society members to preserve the land and protect the plants by removing invasives and doing hydrological restoration.

We are grateful to the native plant societies who have generously shared their local expertise by making their newsletters available to researchers through BHL. In addition to the biodiversity information they contain, these publications are a wonderful snapshot of the small, dedicated groups of people working all over the U.S. to document and preserve our native plants.

Are you interested in getting involved in a native plant society near you? If you live in the U.S. or Canada, check this list compiled by the North American Native Plant Society to locate the closest organization.