All posts tagged with hernaturalhistory

Nearly 120 years ago Emma Jane Cole (1901) published Grand Rapids Flora: A Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Growing Without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Surprisingly, this botanical account published in 1901 for the Grand Rapids area remains the most recent comprehensive treatment of the plants specific to our region. And we still use it!

In the early years of the 21st century, I was delving into the archives of the Grand Rapids Public Museum researching a book to celebrate their 150th anniversary in 2004. Among the lists of men involved in the lyceums and institutes that shaped the beginnings of the western Michigan museum in the 1850s, there finally appears, at the very end of the 19th century, the name of Emma J. Cole, emerging like the first blossom of hepatica on a spring afternoon.

Wiki projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, contain the information that powers the web. Wikipedia is the fifth most-visited website in the world. To edit a Wiki project is to contribute content that could, potentially, be viewed by thousands or even millions of people over time, both on Wiki sites and on sites like Google and Facebook, which harvest data, including media, from Wiki sites.

For the #HerNaturalHistory campaign, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Libraries held three crowd-sourcing citizen science/citizen humanities events in March of 2019. These events were intended to bring new editors to Wiki projects, have editors add information about female scientists to Wikipedia, and have editors add information to BHL collections on Flickr and in Wikimedia Commons utilizing the Wikidata knowledge base/database/catalog.

The beautiful lithographs produced by Elizabeth Gould show lively birds of all shapes and colors performing mating displays, protecting their young, and interacting with their environments. A far cry from the dead-bird-on-stick approach to book illustration of the 18th century and prior, Elizabeth’s birds are reminiscent of the more dynamic figures depicted by John James Audubon; in fact, distinguished ornithologist Prideaux John Selby proclaimed “I like [Elizabeth’s illustrations] as well as Audubon’s.”

Artist Marian Ellis Rowan depicts herself with botanist Alice Lounsberry collaborated to produce several botanical guidebooks. Their three guides are illustrated with pen and ink illustrations as well as full color paintings. Intended to make botanical study accessible for a popular audience, they take an ecological approach by organizing species according to where they habitually grow, from aquatic environments to dry sandy soils.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been partnering with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation to digitize works by women botanical artists held in Kew’s archives. One of these talented but largely unknown artists is Margaret Meen – whose botanicals graced the walls of royal palaces and scientific academies. In fact, though little remembered or written about today, Meen’s botanicals and her prowess as an instructor of fledgling artists left a lasting impression on British botanical illustration.

Historically, female botanists and botanical artists were rarely given as much credit as their male counterparts. Botanical art was often viewed as a pleasant pastime for women who had time on their hands whilst their husbands were at work, and the contribution that these women made to the advancement of scientific illustration was often undermined.

To highlight the importance of these historically, scientifically and socially significant collections, Kew’s Library, Art and Archives department, in collaboration with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, is in the process of digitising its out of copyright work by women artists, spanning several centuries.

Kew holds over 200,000 prints and drawings, and this working resource is available to staff and visitors to the department, often providing a reference tool against preserved herbarium specimens. The ultimate aim of this collaborative effort is to ensure that high quality images of illustrations and their associated data is safely stored in digital format for future generations.