Archipelago Botanicals

After rising to fashion during the 1820s, botany rapidly became the most popular science in America for recreational and pedagogical purposes, and it remained tremendously popular throughout the century. Tens of thousands of enthusiasts, calling themselves "botanizers", embraced the pastime by collecting, identifying, and preserving specimens. Elizabeth Keeney examines the role of botany in the lives of these amateur scientists and establishes the role that they in turn played in the botanical community. Using popular magazines, textbooks, letters, diaries, fiction, and autobiographies of the day, The Botanizers explores the popular culture of this avocation, which attracted both men and women. According to Keeney, amateur botanizers and trained professionals managed to maintain a spirit of cooperation and collegiality throughout most of the century. Amateurs were usually less interested in contributing to science than they were in self-improvement, religious expression, and other aspects of botanizing that were of little importance to professionals. As botany became increasingly professionalized, the goals of professionals and amateurs diverged even further, and by late century, the botanizers had rejected the new biological focus because it ignored their motivations for botanizing.

This comprehensive and authoritative handbook by an experienced botanical artist is intended for the people who ask those questions - who want to portray plants and flowers with botanical accuracy: artists seeking to extend their range, students of illustration wholly or partly devoted to botanical subjects, or amateurs with an interest in botany and natural history who want to record flowers that have given them pleasure. The author gives detailed advice on working in pencil, pen, scraper board, water-colour and gouache, and acrylics; on building up a drawing or painting by stages; on taking measurements and understanding plant structure; on collecting, handling and preserving plant material; and on the use of the hand lens and dissecting microscope. The accurate observation and the techniques that he advocates are equally applicable to the disciplined requirements of providing plates for the scientific press and to illustrations for more popular work or to drawing for pleasure. Essential botanical terms and information are fully explained and illustrated, and there is a glossary. Approximately 130 illustrations (ten in colour) include examples of the work of well-known artists of the past and a large number of diagrams and line drawings.