Trees by Julia Ellen Rogers

It’s fun to find trees I talk about on school field trips in botanical print books. I’m highlighting Julia Ellen Rogers book about trees published in 1926 today. The book includes 48 color illustrations and I’ve picked four favorites. The digital version of the book is available from Internet Archive here.

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The black walnuts that are easy to find at the Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant Farm and Belmont locations. The summer campers find the immature nuts that look like green tennis balls; in the fall field trips the nuts live up to their name – the outer husk becomes a gooey black mess; in the spring we find the nuts the squirrels have eating – like oval works of abstract art.

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The horse chestnut is something I point out when it’s in bloom – during spring time. It is easy to spot at the end of the tree lined road up to the Manor House at Belmont – it is the last tree.  The leaf pattern is interesting as well.

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The sycamores at Belmont are along the drive and into the forest that surrounds Belmont. They are very large trees – hard to miss in the winter because their branches look so white. They also have seed balls that are fuzzy.

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We often ask the children to look at the seed balls for sycamores and sweet gum trees…to describe how they are the same/different. Sweet gum balls are something the students recognized because the trees were planted in many Columbia developments as yard trees (the seeds are spikey but the tree itself is beautiful – nice shade and turns red in the fall).

Simple Botanical Drawings

Draw 50 Flowers, Trees, and other Plants by Lee J. Ames with P. Lee Ames. Available from Internet Archive here.

The drawing diagrams in this book are not at the level of botanical prints but they are a start toward producing plant drawings. If I wanted to create botanical prints, I would quickly graduate to drawing from fresh plant models. For now, I am taking a different direction - using the instruction diagrams as starters for upcoming Zentangles where it is OK for the drawing to not look realistic in the end!

My two favorites are the instructional pages for producing drawings of Skunk Cabbage and a Calla Lilly. These are the one I’ll experiment with first.

2009 Galleries

Rather than creating a page for the 2009 botanical eBooks, I'm including them in a blog post. There are 173 of them in all and the didn't start until April. Enjoy!

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Marianne North

The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Royal Botanical Gardens displays 833 of her paintings displayed in geographical order, which she hung after traveling around the world. She built the gallery and it opened in 1882.

The next best thing to visiting the physical gallery, it to view the online gallery which is organized so that it can be browse by country, plant group, or category. I chose to view each of the ‘plant groups’ as a ‘book’ and then the landscapes it two parts.  Some sample images are below; there are many more in the online gallery. Her paintings are of plants in their natural setting rather than traditional Victorian prints.

Gartenflora

Eduard Regel started the illustrated botanical magazine Gartenflora in 1852. He served at its editor until 1885 but it continued to be published until 1940. Internet Archive has over 50 of them available (link to the list here). The text is in German…but the illustrations are the draw for me anyway. I’ve include a sample image from each of magazine’s I looked at back in 2013.

Paxton’s Magazine of Botany

The Internet Archive has 10+ issues of Paxton’s Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants published from the mid-1830s into the 1840s. Sir Joseph Paxton was the publisher; he is also known for cultivating Cavendish bananas and designing the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The list of links for the volumes available can be found here. Beyond the botanical prints, the issues also are good examples of what was happening with plants during that time. I enjoyed them back in 2013 and include a sample image from the volumes here.

Asa Gray and Trees

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The plates from Asa Gray’s Forest Trees of North America are among my favorite botanical prints. They were produced in the mid-1800s for a report and are works of art. They appeal to me for their beauty and their true-to-life accuracy. Most of them are trees I know and appreciate in Maryland….although the last one in the volume – labelled as a ‘dogwood’ is not the tree that we commonly have in our area by that name. I looked it up on Wikipedia with the genus/species name and found that its common name is green osier, alternate-leaved dogwood, and pagoda dogwood…and it isn’t native to the part of Maryland where I live; it does grow in far western Maryland, however.

Wild flowers of North America (Buek)

Back in 2014, I discovered the multi-volume set of Wild flowers of America produced via subscription by G.H. Buek & Co. in the mid-1890s available on Internet Archive; find them all using this search and enjoy the colorful illustrations. A sample image from each volume is shown below.

Charles Flahault

Back in 2015, I browsed 2 volumes of Charles Flahault’s Nouvelle flore coloriée de poche des Alpes et des Pyrénées (the 1st and 3rd ) and I wondered what had happened to the 2nd volume since I usually look at a full series once I get started. Evidently the 2nd volume was not scanned and made available on Internet Archive until January 2017! So, I recently enjoyed that 2nd volume. What a treat on a cold winter’s day! The three sample images are below. The links to the volumes are Internet Archive are: one, two, three. All three volumes were published in 1906.

Orchids of Britain and Ireland

Some books on Internet Archive are relatively recent publication. Orchids of Britain and Ireland by Anne and Simon Harrap was published in 2009 and is available on the Internet Archive. There are lush photos of orchids throughout.

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As I write this, there is snow on the ground and the temperature is still in the teens. I’m enjoying paging through this book with the pages filling my monitor - being an armchair naturalist.

The Flowering Plants of South Africa

One of the more substantial series I found and browsed in 2016 was the 20+ volumes of The Flowering Plants of South Africa available from Internet Archive. They were published almost annually between 1921 and 1951…with wonderful illustrations as demonstrated by the sample images in the display below. A link to each of the volumes can be found below the group of images. Each volume includes many botanical prints. Enjoy!

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 01 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 02 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 03 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 04 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 05 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 06 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 07 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 08 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 09 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 10 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 11 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 12 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 13 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 14 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 15 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 16 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 17 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 18 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 19 * Evans, I.B. Pole (editor) * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 20 * Phillips, E.P. * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 21 * Phillips, E.P. * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 22 * Phillips, E.P. * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 25 * Dyer, R. Allen * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 26 * Dyer, R. Allen * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 27 * Dyer, R. Allen * sample image

The Flowering Plants of South Africa - Vol 28 * Dyer, R. Allen * sample image

Ehon noyamagusa

5 volumes of flower drawings from the Japanese Illustrated Books from the Edo and Meiji Periods collection made available by Smithsonian Libraries: Ehon Noyamagusa by Tachibana Yazukuni. The books were originally published in the mid-1700s. They are woodblock prints…ink on paper.

The 1700s were a time of exploration around the world and plants were part of the discoveries being made. Many of the plants depicted in these books are in gardens around the world now but would have been new and wonderous in Europe at the time these books were produced.

I picked an image from each of the 5 volumes. My favorite is the last one: lotuses.

Smithsonian Libraries eBooks

Smithsonian Libraries include many digitized books that are freely available. I’ve particularly enjoyed the Japanese Illustrated Books from the Edo and Meiji Periods. The links to eBooks in this collection will bring a page with the cover of the book and a link to ‘read in full screen’

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Which will expand the image into the full screen of your browser window. To start reading, click on the arrow buttons button on the screen or the arrows on your keyboard to turn the page. Note: the Japanese books are read back to front so the ‘<’ arrow moves through the book.

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Many of the books will be ‘too big’ to view in the window so use the ‘-‘ to make the pages small enough to fit. 

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Hathi Trust eBooks

Hathi Trust Digital Library includes quite a few eBooks. The links to eBooks in this collection will bring a page that provides catalog information about the book. If the eBook is multiple volumes, they will generally all be listed in the ‘Viewability’ section. The ones with a ‘full view’ link are the whole book.

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The view shown after clicking on ‘full view’ is usually the two page one unless the last time the viewer was used, another view was selected. I prefer the two page mode most of the time although I do look at the thumbnails if the book has a lot of text. Use the arrow buttons on the screen or the arrow keys on your keyboard to turn pages.

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