In this series of posts on botany and art (1,2,3), I’m looking at a number of ways botanists have documented plants, from Ludwig Reichenbach having herbarium specimens traced to create illustrations (1), to Joseph Banks using the works of Chinese artists as guides in plant collecting (2). In this post, I focus on recording the attributes of fruits. My reference is an article from the first issue of the British Journal of Pomology and Horticultural Science, published in 1919. I cannot recall how I came to this carefully researched piece. The author is Herbert E. Durham, President of the Herefordshire Association of Fruit Growers and Horticulturalists. Fruits, particularly apples I would say, were important to Durham, and he was not happy with the inaccuracies he found in illustrations which were supposed to distinguish among varieties.
Durham considered it difficult if not impossible to communicate the precise placement of structures within the fruit without illustrations, and even illustrations could miss the mark. He writes of a book on British apples in which a plate is described as presenting round fruits where the diameter and height were about equal, yet the height of one fruit was given as 72 mm and the width 85; another fruit referred to as oblong had a height of 80 mm and a diameter of 82 mm. He adds that he himself has “often been surprised when measuring” (p. 30). After introducing other types of errors in illustrations of whole fruits as well as sections through them, Durham presents several approaches to getting dimensions and placement right. I am definitely not going into all the details here; much of the article reads like an instruction manual. But I will briefly note some of the techniques to give a flavor of the care Durham took in his work of representing different varieties, documenting them for the future. Many of the varieties he cared so much about no longer exist, but his working method says a lot to future horticulturalists and botanists about the importance of precision in any form of representation.
To draw the shape of a fruit accurately, Durham devised a simple wooden tool into which a pencil was inserted; this “projection tracer” allowed drawing the circumference and picking up any unevenness in it. Needless to say, he describes not only his method, but how to construct such a tool. He also presents a device, essentially a blade, to cut longitudinal and transverse sections through the fruit to reveal the seeds, intercarpellary space (which he calls the axial sac), and the stalk attachment. The blade has to be very thin, sharp, about 6 inches long, and attached to a bow so it can be accurately placed to get an ideal central longitudinal cut. Durham has unkind words about some drawings made from cuts that were off-center.
Of course, Durham provides illustrations to show what should be revealed in each cut, using apples and pears as examples. The images also demonstrate what he thinks a good illustration should and should not include. These are very simple line drawings with just a surface outline, and the positioning of the seeds and sac wall. Really they are diagrams, extremely clear and understandable. They would not be considered works of art, but they are meticulously drawn for accuracy and clarity, Durham’s chief criteria. He is trying to represent rather subtle differences among varieties, but only in regards to particular traits.
This approach is very different from that used in another set of fruit illustrations that I find particularly satisfying. They are the pomological watercolors created by artists for the USDA in the early part of the 20th century and now preserved in its National Agricultural Library. There is an unofficial Twitter feed (@pomological) that posts images from this digitized collection. I love to look at these illustrations, most picture the whole fruit along with a cross section that even Durham would admire. There are also images of fruit with pathologies and many of these are strangely beautiful. Now a book of the illustrations has been published (Landy, 2021).
After all this emphasis on accuracy, I want to end with another way to record fruit form that intrigues me. I read about it a number of years ago in a blog post from the Smithsonian Institution’s Field Book Project. Emily Hunter, one of the transcribers, described a notebook kept by a US Department of Agriculture botanist, David Griffiths (1867-1935) during a collecting trip to Texas and Mexico in 1905. He was focusing on the Opuntia genus of cacti, and specifically on their fruit which are fleshy—I think Durham would describe them as oblong. On several pages, there are blotches stamped, and they vary in size and shape with the species discussed in the accompanying notes. While Griffiths doesn’t identify what they are, Hunter surmises that they were made by cutting the fruit in half and pressing the cut surface to the paper. Each pressing is outlined in pencil and the central fleshy area is also outlined. This was a rough-and-ready form of nature printing, but an effective one. Griffiths had neither the tools nor probably the time to make measurements and diagrams like Durham’s, but he figured out how he could quickly get the basic information down in his notebook. I think of their respective images as a link between these two horticulturalists, in different countries, with very different interests and methods, but united in wanting to do justice to the forms they studied.
References
Durham, H. E. (1919). The Recognition of Fruit—Graphic Records. Journal of Pomology and Horticultural Science, 1(1), 28–36.
Landy, J., United States, & Department of Agriculture. (2021). An illustrated catalog of American fruits & nuts: The U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Los Angeles: Atelier.
Herbarium World 