All posts tagged with kew

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.

On the 30th June 1817, Joseph Dalton Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk. The second child of William Jackson Hooker, Joseph would, during the course of his life, become a ‘botanical trailblazer’ – traveling across the globe to collect plants and theorizing on plant species diversity and geography.

  Flora sinensis is one of the first natural history books on China by a European. Authored by Michał Piotr Boym, it was published in 1656 by Matthæi Rictii in Vienna. Boym dedicated it to Leopold I (1640-1705), Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Bohemia and King of Serbia, and included a poem incorporating chronograms alluding to his coronation date, 1655. Augustin Pyramus, a Swiss Botanist, identified Boym as the first person to use ‘flora’ to define the plants of a particular region, habitat or geological period.

This week, Chris Mills, Head of Library, Art, and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, celebrates his retirement. Chris has served as the Head of the Library at Kew since 2006, before which he served as the Head of Collections and Services at the Natural History Museum, London. The Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has the distinction of being one of BHL’s 10 founding institutions, and now represents one of BHL’s 16 Member Libraries.