From “Picturing the Lily” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:
“More than any other science, botany depends on pictures. The fragility of plants and even dried specimens, which lose their living colour and form, make scientific study difficult. Botanical illustrations made plants visible and reproducible for analysis. They evolved from hand-drawn copies and crude woodcuts of stylized plants in medieval herbals to finely detailed copper etchings and splendid colour lithographs in lavish folios, books and magazines. In the process, which unfolded over centuries along with new botanical discoveries and developments in printmaking techniques, they presented a more complete natural history of nearly every plant and flower, including extraordinary images of many different kinds of lilies….
“By the early seventeenth century flowers were increasingly grown, not only for food or medicine but also purely for their beauty and decorative qualities…. As gardening became increasingly popular, botanical illustrations found new outlets in periodicals that combined botanical discoveries with horticultural information. Published in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and America, they appealed to a wide readership. Many of the plants discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had their debut in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, first published in London in 1797 by William Curtis, an apothecary-turned-botanist, and still produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Veitch Nurseries, one of the most important plant collectors in the nineteenth century, displayed more than 400 of its plant introductions in the magazine, including the wild lilies discovered in Asia by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson.
“Despite printing innovations in the first half of the twentieth century, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine used only hand-coloured plates before 1948…. After [Walter Hood] Fitch’s resignation in 1878, Matilda Smith became the chief artist. Lilian Snelling was the magazine’s chief artist from 1922 to 1952, and among her individual accomplishments was the supplement to [Henry John] Elwes’s Monograph on the Genus Lilium in the years 1934–40.”
From “Lilium regale” in Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:
“While some lilies could be considered awkward or even vexatious in the garden, delightful Lilium regale is a species that is not only magnificent to look at, but also satisfyingly easy to grow. Encountered in 1903 by legendary plant hunter Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in the Min Valley, Sichuan Province, China, he wrote of this flower:
“‘There, in narrow, semi-arid valleys, down which thunder torrents, and encompassed by mountains composed of mud-shales and granites, whose peaks are clothed with snow eternal, the Regal Lily has its home. In summer the heat is terrific, in winter the cold is intense, and at all seasons these valleys are subject to sudden and violent wind-storms.… There, in June, by the wayside, in rock-crevices by the torrent’s edge, and high up on the mountainside and precipice, this lily in full bloom greets the weary wayfarer. Not in twos and threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands.’
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale — also known as the Regal Lily, Royal Lily, or King’s Lily — that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this summer. The first post is Lilium Regale, the Regal Lily and Its History (1 of 2), where I wrote about Ernest Henry Wilson’s expeditions and his singular connection to the Regal Lily.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Wilson’s use of photography and writing together to document his explorations and discoveries, and how that work intersected with the burgeoning interest in botanical illustration in the service of science, art, and horticulture — reflecting botany’s reliance on pictures, as described in the first excerpt above.
The first photo below is from Wilson’s book Plant Hunting: Volume 2 and the second one is from The Lilies of Eastern Asia. They are, of course, of the same scene; but I thought it was interesting that Wilson captioned them differently: the one on the left as “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” and the other as “L. Regale Wilson” — the difference likely because Wilson’s plant hunting volumes are more informal and autobiographical, while The Lilies of Eastern Asia presents his discoveries in a scientific and naturalist context. The use of “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” also coincides with what I discussed in the first post about Wilson’s use of monarchy-adjacent terms to describe Lilium regale — something he was more likely to do in his writings that were directed toward general audiences.
This photo appears to have been taken in a garden setting, not during any of the China trips Wilson made to gather Lilium regale specimens. Though I never could identify exactly where it was taken, it is not among those photographs I linked to in the previous post — E. H. Wilson China Expedition Photographs from the Arnold Arboretum — so I might speculate that Wilson took it later to illustrate his books rather than as an expedition image. With some exceptions, his expedition photographs were more often documentation of the locale, terrain, shrubs, trees, and assistants he employed on his trips, an approach that also reflected the ephemeral nature of the species he encountered (they may or may not have been blooming when he found them), and the nature of photography at the time, where cameras were more suitable for what we would now think of as wide-angle photography.
While photography was consistently used on botanical explorations around Wilson’s time, as his photography skills grew, Wilson became notable not only for the quantity of photographs he took, but for his profuse use of his own images in his books. His biographer Roy W. Briggs gives us some insight into that, and also helps us see where Wilson’s photography fit in the history of photography more generally, in this passage from the book “Chinese” Wilson: A Life of Ernest H. Wilson, 1876-1930:
“It is the quality as well as quantity of the photographic illustrations in Wilson’s books that sets them apart from the works of other authors of the period writing in the same field. It must have been a source of annoyance to Wilson that the technology for producing colour photographs had not been developed. The disparity between what he had originally seen projected on to the ground-glass plate at the focal plane of his camera lens and the final processed monochrome image must surely have been a disappointment to him.“
That color photography was still in its early development at the time — it was largely experimental — explains why complete documentation of encountered botanical specimens was bridged through a combination of photography and botanical art in Wilson’s era. While Wilson’s use of photography documented his expeditions and the species he encountered, publications like Curtis’s Botanical Magazine sought to appeal to scientists, horticulturalists, and gardeners of varied levels of expertise with detailed, accurately colored illustrations.
Here, for example, we have Lilium myriophyllum (an early though imprecise name assigned to Lilium regale) by Matilda Smith (from Flowers From the Royal Gardens of Kew: Two Centuries of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine), which shows not only the characteristics of a typical Regal Lily and renders its stunning colors and its growth patterns, but also includes smaller sidebar details of the flower’s unopened blossoms and its pistils:
And here’s a similar example by Lilian Snelling (from Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collection), where once again we see an elaborate but realistic presentation of the shapes, textures, and colors of the plant and its flowers, as well as the structure of its rooting bulbs.
For botanists, explorers, horticulturalists, and gardeners alike, this accumulated demonstration of developing botanical knowledge — starting with expedition photography like Wilson’s followed by his extensive narratives, augmented by the art in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine — provided a robust picture of the discovery and movement of previously unknown plants throughout the Western world.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
Gorgeous