What a beautiful name, Flower!

Botanical prints

Planting in Canada is ‘scheduled’ for Victoria Day – second half of May.  Anything planted before that ‘turn of the season’ is in danger! Just a week before the ‘right planting date’, I rushed to cover my bougainvillea, recently moved from the winter indoors to the patio, to protect it from a sudden night frost.  Not the first time – we inevitably get fooled into believing the spring had settled in, just to witness our prematurely planted annuals get hurt by whims of the Canadian weather.  No wonder we can barely wait for that ‘safe’ time to get our gardens going.

In our first workshop of the season, we found some reprieve from this eager anticipation by creating a series of botanical prints – garden is an art (as we mused in ‘Four garden rambles‘) – and art is a garden (a theme to our exuberant summer project ‘Art Garden‘).  Besides purely scientific cataloguing of species, botanical prints have been used in interior art displays for ages, changing sensibilities and bringing outside in.

Botanical drawings and prints have a special place in sciences and arts. Leonardo’s curiosity and exploration of the nature resulted in exquisite drawings depicting botanical species (see a composite of few below), mesmerizing for both their inquisitive precision and his artistic amazement with their intricacies and beauty.

Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus  (here is a movie about his life and work) was a botanist, zoologist and physician who formalized the modern system of naming organisms and botanical species – he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals throughout his life (1707-1778) and was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe at the time of his death.   I proudly carried several prints from Linnaeus’s botanical species drawings from my visit to Uppsala – still on my walls among all the abstract and modernist artworks, natural. 

Our own series of botanical prints were made using various techniques of gel printing, with backgrounds of parchment and pastels. Flowery, or leafy species, printed from drawings or real plants emerging in the spring garden.  With an air of ‘archival’, and, as always, a ‘modern’ twist.  And a face among them…