Found Botany
A Fusion Of Art, History, And Science
I visited the Museum of Natural History at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, several years ago. While there, I noticed a small exhibit on the 3rd floor. This exhibit was made of photographic prints by an artist named Amanda Means. She developed a technique for creating incredibly detailed images of plant material by placing them in an enlarger in a darkroom. The plant material replaced the negative in the enlarger, and the resulting images were almost like radiographs. The images revealed hidden details about the plants and showed stunning organization, structure, and patterns. As an amateur botanist and photographer, I was captivated by these images.
Shortly after this visit, I purchased an 1880 copy of "Gray's School and Field Book Of Botany" on EBAY. I purchased it as a curiosity, really, and sort of an impulse buy. I spent about 3 dollars on the book and probably more on shipping. I refer to this as Book 1. It was owned by a young woman named Percie Bartholomew around 1880 in Jonesville, MI. She used it as part of her high school botany class.
I thought I was just getting an old botany book, but instead, I found a veritable bounty of botanical treasures. It was packed with around 150 little plants, all exquisitely preserved. She was also a romantic and had penned lines from her favorite poems in the back of the book. These poems gave me a sense of the person, and I became intrigued by who she was. As it turns out, she was the youngest of 8 children, and, by the customs of the time, she was expected to stay home and care for her parents until they passed away. Using genealogical records, I learned quite a bit about her life. Check out the collectors section to learn more about Percie and the other collectors.
Next, inspired by the work of Amanda Means, I set out to try to create photographic images of these plant bits. What I found was that about 90% of the plants were too dense to make good images, but the ones that were thin and translucent enough produced stunning photos.
This is the origin of what I call The Found Botany Project: photographic images from plant bits found in old books combined with the life stories of the collectors. As it turns out, old books with plant material are hard to come by, and in the 5 years I spent actively working on it, I only found 11 books. However, from these 11 books, I collected, cataloged, and preserved over 400 flowers and leaves that are 130 to 180 years old. I hope you enjoy these images and stories as much as I do.
The Images
The Collectors
Most of the books I purchased had at least some clue as to whooriginally owned them. It was a common practice during the 19thcentury for owners of books to write their names in them and oftentheir hometown as well. This may be because they were such prizedpossessions, but it also appears that in other cases, the books wouldhave been handed in to the teacher along with the plants pressedbetween the pages as part of a final exam.
I found itinteresting that most of these books were owned by women. We havenotions that women weren't often highly educated in 19th-centuryAmerica. Amanda Durland's book was used as part of her collegestudies at the Seneca Collegiate Institute in Ovid, New York, in1858. During this year at that school, the number of womenoutnumbered the number of men by 144 to 128.
Of course, thestories of these collectors are incomplete given the amount of timethat has passed. As far as I can tell, none of these collectors werefamous in any way, but this makes their stories all the moremeaningful for me. Their stories provide glimpses of how differentlife was in the 19th century. Families tended to be much larger, butit was common for one or more of the children in a family to die atan early age. Hellen Riker herself died at the relatively young ageof 19 from tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called back then. She was one of 9 children, 3 of which died from tuberculosis between1862 and 1869.
Percie Bartholomewwas the youngest of 8 children and according to the customs of thetime she was expected to stay home and care for her parents untilthey passed away. Her father died in 1889 and her mother inSeptember of 1895 when Percie was 35 years old. Within 3 months,though, she was married to Adelbert Eugene Wisner, the president ofthe bank in town.
