Botanical Illustrations

Botanical illustrations were an integral facet of botany in the Renaissance era. Many naturalists and physicians studied plants in collections to observe and record the naturalia. In many collections, specimens were displayed for visitors to draw and then create illustrations or prints. With an illustration, detail in plants could be captured and visually understood instead of learning through text. The great feature of illustrations was the fact that the specimens could be exotic yet still studied. Kusukawa says, “Pictures enabled scholars to access unobtainable objects, build knowledge of rare objects over time, and study them long after the live specimens had died away.” The illustrations were paired with text information about the plant and often distributed in herbal volumes. Herbal volumes were series of illustrations and knowledge published to spread knowledge. These botanical illustrations are samplings of three different 16th-17th century figures to record plants. [excerpt

Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today

Garden as Symbol: Nature/City

My approach .to environmental aesthetics here begins with reflections on previous encounters with the subject, focusing initially on aesthetics of the city. Then follows a brief look at current theories of environmental aesthetics as they relate to nature aesthetics. The final section will consider garden as a symbolic link of nature/city. Nelson Goodman \u27s theory of exemplification will serve as an account of garden as a symbol linking nature and city

The utopia of personality: Moisei Ginzburg’s project for the Moscow Park of Culture and Leisure

The article was submitted on 01.07.2015.This article focuses on Moisei Ginzburg’s competition entry for the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow (1931), assessing its nature as a utopian landscape. It demonstrates how the program of the project emerged from the debates on modernist town planning as an attempt to adapt ideas developed in the course of these debates to existing urban context. Emerging prior to the rest of the modernist urban environment, the park assumed the role of representing the settlement of the future within the city of the past, while simultaneously forming a part and parcel of the urban system to come. It was both inscribed into the modernist system of the zonal division of the city as the recreation zone and itself divided into separate zones, becoming a miniature model of an ideal modernist city of the future. The project was based on the principles of “disurbanism,” an approach to town planning, which Ginzburg earlier developed in his project of the Green City near Moscow (1930). Following the theoretician of disurbanism Mikhail Okhitovich, Ginzburg declared the individual (rather than the family or the group) the basic unit of society, and consequently, personal development became the major mission that his park was to perform. As a result, the Park of Culture and Leisure became not a site, but a mechanism of personal and urban transformation.Статья посвящена заявке Моисея Гинзбурга на конкурс проектов Центрального парка культуры и отдыха в Москве (1931), рассматривавшей природу как утопический ландшафт. Автор показывает, каким образом программа проекта возникла в дебатах о современном планировании городов в качестве попытки применить идеи, развитые в ходе этих дебатов, к существующему городскому контексту. Возникнув прежде окружающей современной городской среды, парк принимал роль представителя поселения будущего внутри города прошлого, одновременно формируя частицу грядущей городской системы. Он вписывался в рамки модернистской системы зонирования города как рекреационная зона и одновременно сам дробился на меньшие зоны, сделавшись миниатюрной моделью идеального модернистского города будущего. Проект опирался на принципы дезурбанизма - подхода к планированию городов, который Гинзбург ранее применил в проекте Зеленого Города под Москвой (1930). Следуя теории дезурбанизма Михаила Охитовича, Гинзбург провозгласил индивида (но не семью или группу) базовой единицей общества, и, следовательно, развитие личности сделалось основной миссией, которую парк должен был исполнить. В результате парк культуры и отдыха должен был стать не местом, но механизмом персонального и городского преображения

Shining a light on occupational inter-relationships

Abstract: In this independent research paper four Canberra-based projects were examined to explore the significance of interpersonal skills in technical occupations. The importance of interpersonal skills and demands for teamwork, cooperation and collaboration during projects was confirmed. The implications of skill terminology, career practitioner advice, occupational information, and gendered career choices are explored. The research points to the need to shift thinking about skill distinctions to give greater recognition to interpersonal skills in technical occupations

EXHIBITION Louisiana\u27s Natural Treasure: Margaret Stones, Botanical Artist

In 2020, LSU Libraries Special Collections presented the exhibition “Louisiana’s Natural Treasure: Margaret Stones, Botanical Artist” at Hill Memorial Library, featuring selected original watercolor paintings and archival materials related to the Native Flora of Louisiana project. A native of Australia, Margaret Stones (1920-2018) achieved an acclaimed international career that spanned three continents. Commissioned by LSU and funded by private donations, more than 200 watercolor drawings of Louisiana plants produced by Stones during the 1970s and 1980s are among the most treasured holdings of LSU Libraries Special Collections. The Native Flora of Louisiana project was grounded in a long historical tradition of botanical illustration. Stones only worked from live specimens, requiring the collection of the plant through all of its stages and seasons to include flower, fruit, and seed. Many intrepid collectors navigated swamp and forest to secure representative species, their endeavors documented by the artist on the finished drawings. All of the works have been made available online in the Louisiana Digital Library. In the centennial year of her birth, we celebrate the story of Margaret Stones and the Flora of Louisiana both in tribute to her legacy, and with the hope of introducing her work to new audiences

W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory, Visitor Engagement Study, Summary of Findings,

Summary of findings: Study of visitor engagement and learning at the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma, Washington. Findings include: analysis of visitor responses to a survey and analysis of observations of visitor engagement. Written for Metro Parks, Tacoma, Washington

Making public the private life of plants: the contribution of informal learning environments

Plants are essential to life on Earth and yet are often deemed invisible by the human populace. Botanic gardens are an under-researched educational context and, as such, have occupied a peripheral arena in biology education discussions. This article seeks to readdress this absence and present the case for a more sustained use of informal learning environments, such as botanic gardens and homes, to make public the private life of plants and their role in sustaining life on Earth. By drawing on empirical data from a doctoral thesis and reviewing relevant research literature, the author argues for a renewed focus on botanical education within science education in both formal and informal contexts