The Humanities Institute hosted a Colloquium on Friday, September 9, 2016, entitled Shifts in the 19th-century American Cultural Landscape. Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas, this round-table looked at the various cultural-philosophic and economic forces that led to rapidly changing landscapes in America. Participants discussed how these developments impacted the 19th-century vision of nature, the art of landscape painting, and the design of gardens and choice of plants.
The LuEsther T. Mertz Library is pleased to welcome Lee & Low Books to the Children’s Collection. The titles below celebrate diversity and all reading levels through fun and colorful stories. Come by and check them out for yourself!
The bilingual poetry of Maya Christina Gonzalez in Call Me Tree / Llàmame arbol flows beautifully. She invites the reader to experience what it means to be a tree—from seed to leaves. From curling up very small like a seed in the ground to reaching high into the sky, this story will make young readers want to get up and be a tree! This a perfect book to read aloud as its language and illustrations are a treat for all to experience.
Visitors to a garden are often impressed by the showy, brightly colored roses and barely notice the smaller, humbler daisies. Likewise, visitors to the Rare Book Room in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden often admire the large folio volumes of botanical illustrations by renowned botanical artists, but are unaware of the treasures among the smaller print volumes on the shelves. For the last two years I’ve been examining the names written and bookplates pasted in these books, trying to trace the histories of these books and to identify their former owners. This detective work has revealed that many books have led fascinating lives.
One book that has had a particularly noteworthy life is Apologia adversus amathum lusitanum by Pietro Mattioli, first published in 1558. Mattioli (1501–1577) was a well-known physician, botanist, and natural scientist from Siena, Italy. His book is a discussion of another book, first published in 1557, In Dioscoridis Anazarbei de materia medica libri quinque, enarrationes eruditissimae by Lusitano Amato (Juan Rodrigo Del Castel-Branco) (1511–1568), a well-known Jewish-Portuguese physician and natural scientist. Amato’s book is a discussion of De materia medica, written in the first century A.D. by the Roman physician Dioscorides (c.A.D. 40–90). De materia medica was a comprehensive compilation and description of plants and their derivatives and of animal and mineral substances used as medicines at that time and was one of the most important reference books on medical substances in the Western world for 1600 years.
Paulina Saliga, Executive Director of SAH (center), and Study Day participants gather in the Mertz Library’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Reading Room.
On September 25, 2015, the Humanities Institute hosted a special Study Day for members of the Society of Architectural Historians. Celebrating its 75th anniversary, SAH has for many decades provided important leadership in furthering the understanding of architecture, landscapes, and urban planning, encouraging new design solutions and conserving the world’s cultural heritage. The Society aims to inspire critical thinking about the central role that architecture and landscape design play in the quality of everyday life.
The New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library is home to a trove of botanical treasures—and not just of the written variety. Our Library also contains one of the country’s most extensive collections of nursery and seed catalogs, windows into the rich history of botany and horticulture that are valued as much for their incredible artwork as for their academic uses.
Thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, you can now bring a bit of that art home in the form of 10 colorful new postage stamps from the Botanical Art Forever collection. Each one boasts a piece of artwork from a catalog published as early as the Garden’s founding in 1891 and up into the early 20th century. They’ll be available nationwide, so keep an eye out!
Play Beanstalk and help BHL preserve scientific literature!
Just when you thought purposeful gaming couldn’t get more exciting, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is swooping in with an event called Data Dash! (To learn more about the Purposeful Gaming project, check out this Plant Talk post from October.)
The BHL Data Dash seeks to amp up the competition of online gaming while providing valuable data correction for works shared through BHL. The BHL Blog says, “We’re enlisting the help of you, the BHL community, to help us correct one million words from BHL’s OCR output that we can then use as a training set to apply to the remaining BHL corpus of 320 million incorrect words.” OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows for the conversion of scanned documents (including PDFs) to readable data, or searchable text.
What does this mean for you, and how can you be involved? On Monday, December 7, the day will begin with a Beanstalk Sprint. Starting at 9 a.m. EST, users can work together to meet the Data Dash goal of one million words by playing the game Beanstalk and correcting as many words as possible within two days. Users must register in order to be eligible for prizes.
Stephen Sinon is Head of Information Services and Archives in the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.
Sample of plans from the Lord & Burnham Co. collection
The Lord and Burnham Co. was the premier builder of glasshouses in 19th- and 20th-century America. The firm was a natural choice for the founders of The New York Botanical Garden to turn to as they commissioned the design and construction of the largest and finest conservatory in America, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, which remains the centerpiece of the Garden today. Lord and Burnham constructed glasshouses for many well-known private clients, schools, parks, and botanical gardens across the country, but they never built anything larger than the Haupt Conservatory, which features a 90-foot central dome and one acre under glass.
The original plans and drawings for the Haupt Conservatory can be found in the Garden Archives along with architectural plans for 140,000 other clients which form part of the surviving business records of the Lord and Burnham Co.
Stephen Sinon is Head of Information Services and Archives in the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.
The Stone Mill
It’s not every day that someone walks into your life to present you with a piece of history from your past, but that is exactly what happened here recently at The LuEsther T. Mertz Library. We had a visitor who rode the Garden tram and heard mention of the Lorillard family on the tram’s narrated tour. She recalled owning a jar with the name “Lorillard” written on it and wondered if there was any connection.
As it turned out, the jar in question happened to be filled with tobacco snuff which was milled at the Garden’s historic Stone Mill and apparently never opened. The gift of this jar was accompanied by several commemorative catalogs from the Lorillard Tobacco Company and a newspaper article dated December 31, 1893, discussing the award winners at the World’s Fair held in Chicago that year. Known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, the fair was held to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of the Americas.
The numerous Neoclassical stucco facades found at the fair, the first to feature electrical illumination, earned it the name “The White City” and had a profound influence on the urban beautification movement in America. The Mertz Library Building and The New York Botanical Garden itself grew out of this movement.
