Botany for Amateurs: Craft

Paper cutout of Passiflora laurifolia by Mary Delany. In the collection of the British Museum

I ended the last post remarking that it’s hard to fit botanical work into neat categories; the same is true of art and craft.  They just can’t be separated any more than professionals are distinct from amateurs.  However, craft can have connotations of amateurism, implying that professionals have raised their work to an art.  Some of the examples of scrapbooks I discussed in the last post were definitely works of art; some of them less so.  In this post, I want to explore the relationship between botany and crafts like embroidery.  Maybe I’m being sexist when I say that the last sentence probably caused male readers to sign off.  But wait, professional embroidery in many parts of the world is a male bastion, and was in Europe for many centuries.  Those amazing Elizabethan clothes—for men and women—as well as elaborate furnishings were designed and sewn by men (Parker, 1984).  Only gradually did embroidery become a well-developed skill among elite women and part of their education.  Famously, Mary Queen of Scots embroidered elaborate emblems during her imprisonment in the home of Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury and an accomplished needlewoman.  Among other sources for their designs was Mary’s copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s herbal, but she also had the garden of Hardwick Hall as a source of inspiration (LaBouff, 2018). 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned a present-day embroiderer who goes to the garden for inspiration, and for information on the plants she renders (Aoki, 2017).  But there are also artists using plant material in less conventional ways.  Susanna Bauer, who is a German-born artist living in Britain, makes works by embroidering on leaves.  There are a number practitioners of this art, which also involves a great deal of craft.  As anyone who has worked in an herbarium knows, dried leaves can be very brittle, but Bauer chooses her materials carefully and works slowly and deliberately.  Her pieces are commentaries on human/plant interactions and human/human relationships as well.  Set against white backgrounds they become reminiscent of herbarium specimens where the intervention is artistic rather than scientific, yet both approaches invite close inspection. 

Imke van Boekhold, a Dutch artist, used machine embroidery on wire to create three-dimensional renderings of Scottish plants for her thesis presentation.  Years later, she returned to this theme, but instead, created herbarium specimens and used them as her models.  The first set of work was pretty, the second set awe-inspiring.  She exhibited the works and the specimens at the Natural History Museum, Rotterdam.  Meanwhile in New Delhi Sumakshi Singh has taken a related tack, machine embroidering depictions of plants in black thread on see-through white fabric.  Exhibited in white frames against white walls, they seem to float.  She also takes several other approaches, including three-dimensional pieces floating in glass containers.  Machine embroidery of this caliber requires at least as much skill as handwork and is also as time-consuming.  Like Mary Queen of Scots, Singh has time to think about the forms she is creating and how they present the living world—making the familiar strange so viewers will take note and spend time considering that world. 

I want to end my exploration of embroidery by jumping back to an earlier practitioner so I can also jump to a different craft.  The 18^th century amateur botanist Mary Delany was a keen observer of plants and created highly realistic embroidery designs as well as using those created by others.  She is known for a gown decorated with 200 stitched flowers that she wore to be presented to the queen.  However, she is even better known for her collages of flowers made from pieces of colored paper.  She created nearly a thousand of these, beginning at age 72.  Meticulously done, each has a black paper background and each depicts a single species, as in botanical illustrations (Orr, 2019).

In her early pieces, Delany often added details in watercolor, but as she became more adept almost all features were made of paper pieces.  Her passionflower is incredible (see above).  Like herbarium specimens, these collages are not quite two dimensional; they have depth and texture and she used mottled papers to increase the perception of texture.  Delany was a dedicated gardener of the inquisitive sort who wanted to know as much about plants as possible.  This interest was shared by her good friend, Margaret Bentinick, the Duchess of Portland.  Together they took botany lessons with Bentinck’s chaplain, John Lightfoot author of a flora of Scotland.  They also worked on dissecting flowers and creating herbarium specimens.  All these activities require attention to detail and digital skill; they are related and cannot be totally separated—they enrich each other. 

After Delany’s death, a few tried to imitate her technique, including William Booth Grey, but these works were not as detailed and lifelike; they lacked the energy and enthusiasm that she put into her art.  Delany had for years done paper cutting, including silhouettes in black paper.  At the time and even earlier such paper art was commonplace, particularly in Germany where it was known as Scherenschnitt.  In the late 17^th century Johann Christoph Ende created what could be called a paper herbarium, with cutouts of two hundred plants.  Beneath each he gave the German and then Latin name as well as a description of the plant and its uses.  Some are so intricate as to be lace-like.  Ende was a skilled craftsman indeed, and an amateur botanist as well (see below).

Scherenschnitt of Arum by Johann Christoph Ende in Sonderbares Kräuterbuch. Berlin State Library, Ms. germ. fol. 223

References

Aoki, K. (2017). Embroidered Garden Flowers. Boulder: Roost.

LaBouff, N. (2018). Embroidery and Information Management: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick Reconsidered. Huntington Library Quarterly, 81(3), 315–358. https://doi.org/10.1353/HLQ.2018.0014

Orr, C. C. (2019). Mrs Delany: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Parker, R. (1984). The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New York: Routledge.

Art and the Herbarium: On and Off the Wall

Herbarium display at London hotel coffee shop

In the last post, I discussed recent trends in botanical illustration, scientifically correct renderings of plants that can also be aesthetically magnificent.  Though he sometimes questioned its use, especially in writings on genera (Reeds, 2004), even Carl Linnaeus agreed about its beauty.  He papered the bedroom of his country home in Hammarby with hand-painted illustrations from Christoph Trew’s Plantae Selectae.  These were done by one of the greatest botanical artists, Georg Ehret.  While the prints are still in place, they pose a problem for art historians and restorers, as Per Cullhed (2008) notes in an essay written for a Linnean Society symposium marking the 300^th anniversary of Linnaeus’s birth.  Restoration would be difficult because the paper has been severely damaged in places and may not survive an intervention.  However, doing nothing means that deterioration will continue.  Cullhen likens the problem to the dilemma of preserving Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper without making it look very different from how it appeared before restoration.

Several years ago I wrote an article on the biology of interior decoration (Flannery, 2005), which, I argued, stems from biophilia, defined by E.O. Wilson (1984) as an innate urge to connect with other species.  Yes, this includes having house plants and owning dogs and/or cats, but it also means dried flowers—sort of a 3-D herbarium—and sitting on a couch with a floral chintz print.  Then there are the botanical prints that grace many people’s homes and seem to be perennial favorites.  Recently, I’ve seen a different though less widespread trend.  On my first morning in London on a visit in 2018, I planned to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  But first, of course, I needed breakfast.  As I sat down to order my coffee and scone, I was amazed to see an array of framed herbarium specimens on the restaurant’s wall (see image above).  It was quite a display, and on closer examination turned out to be from an unnamed collector who pressed them in Italy in the early years of the 20^th century.  They made a beautiful display.  A friend told me of a restaurant in New York with a similar presentation, and The World of Interiors magazine featured the bathroom of a stately home with framed specimens hanging over the tub (Shaw, 2019).  I am of two minds about this trend, if it can be called that.  It does get herbaria seen by a wider audience, but unaccompanied by a museum-like descriptive card, viewers might not even realize what they are seeing.  The restaurant’s wait staff had never given them a second glance until I swooned over the display, and then they did look more closely, a tiny victory for the herbarium world.

Over the centuries, most people took a different approach to surrounding themselves with flowers:  they used wallpaper.  In the case of William Kilburn, a botanical illustrator for William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, branching out into commercial floral designs for wall coverings and fabrics turned out to be more lucrative (Nelson, 2008).  He gave up the exacting scientific work, but his designs still revealed his attention to detail.  The 20^th-century botanical artist Anne Ophelia Dowden also designed fabric.  In the 21^st century, individuals sometimes moved in the opposite direction.  A number of those enrolled in the Certificate Program in Botanical Illustration at New York Botanical Garden were fabric designers who had lost work when the industry moved to digital art.

There is also another aspect of floral fabric design, and that’s the use of embroidery.  This is an old tradition that began with embellishment of religious vestments in the middle ages and then became common on the clothing of wealthy men and women and in home decorations.  This work was done by professionals, usually men, but then in the Renaissance, embroidery began to be taken up by upper-class women, with several pieces even attributed to Mary Queen of Scots (Parker, 1984).  Embroiderers used patterns books that were filled with floral illustrations to be copied onto fabric.  Jacques Le Moyne, who produced exquisite flower paintings, came out of the floral fabric design tradition of the French Huguenots.  A pattern book of plants and animals for embroidery was based on his work.

Today, there are a number of fiber artists who do beautiful floral embroideries, sometimes for high-end fashion designers, sometimes as works of art.  Karen Nicol’s work is one example of these approaches.  In addition, there is one artist whose work I find particularly intriguing because it is definitely in the herbarium tradition.  Susanna Bauer presses fallen leaves and then adds embroidery to them:  in some cases “repairing” insect damage with crochet, in others carefully adding stitches to the leaves without causing them to crack.  Her pieces definitely make the viewer look more carefully at the leaf.  They provide a different dimension to our relationship with nature, something more intimate than simply pressing plant material between sheets of paper.

Sarah Herzog modeling the labcoat she embroidered for her graduate adviser, Dr. Maribeth Latvis

Other artists use machine sewing to represent plants in intriguing ways, such as Sumakshi Singh’s black thread sketches on thin fabric, creating a cloth herbarium collection of ethereal plant drawings.  In addition, there are two embroiderers whose work I found on Twitter.  One is the textile artist Charlotte Lade who volunteers at the herbarium of the Natural History Museum, London and creates work based on the specimens.  Also, Maribeth Latvis, who teaches at South Dakota State University and directs the Taylor Herbarium there, tweeted that her student had asked to decorate her lab coat and returned it festooned with embroidered flowers (see above).

References

Cullhed, P. (2008). The conservation of iconic objects and Linnaeus’ books and wallpaper. In The Linnaean Legacy (pp. 135–140). Linnean Society of London.

Flannery, M. C. (2005). Jellyfish on the ceiling and deer in the den: The biology of interior decoration. Leonardo, 38(3), 239–244.

Nelson, E. C. (2008). William Kilburn’s calico patterns, copyright and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 25(4), 361–373.

Parker, R. (1984). The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New York, NY: Routledge.

Reeds, K. (2004). When the botanist can’t draw: The case of Linnaeus. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 29(3), 248–258.

Shaw, R. B. (2019). Tack’s exempt. The World of Interiors, April, 218–227.

Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.