What: Illustrated Leaves: Florilegia from the 16th-21st centuries
Where and when: Auckland Museum, second floor, to March
The swastika-smooching Auckland Grammar boys who embarrassed their school after a visit to Auckland Museum could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by visiting another exhibition in the building instead.
Nazi memorabilia may be racy for kids who don't understand history, but Illustrated Leaves is about history as well - the obsessive quest to discover and classify plant specimens as Europeans roamed further and further away from home from the 1500s onwards. Like expeditions to discover "new" animal species, plant expeditions were the mania of their times, and the art of drawing the plants was - and still is - highly specialised, and highly regarded.
The oldest volume on display in the room next door to the museum's Scars On the Heart area (where the Nazi-salute shenanigans occurred) dates back to 1576. French botanist Matthias de L'Obel's Plantarum, seu, Stirpium Historia (Plants, or, an Account of Their Lineage), is a fat book containing 1441 woodcut images, pioneering a new system of plant classification based on leaf form. It was acquired by the museum in 1910.
On the other side of the room, a page from a mid-18th century book by German botanist Georg Dionysius Ehret glows in the darkened room. It's an etched, hand-painted plate of three plants, a couple of butterflies and papaya fruit. Museum library services manager Bruce Ralston explains that the book, along with a few others, came to the museum in 1954 after being lent by an English gardener for an exhibition. He died before the exhibition opened and his estate left the books with the museum.
An ancient Herbal by John Gerard (1545-1611) - rescued, says Ralston, from being chucked out during a house clearance - shows hand-drawn woodcut images of the potato plant, introduced to Europe in 1536, with instructions on how to cook this exciting new vegetable. Copies of The Botanical Magazine, founded by Kew Gardens botanist William Curtis in 1787 and still running, are here, including two pages introducing the pohutakawa to the world.
Actual plant specimens collected during Captain Cook's first voyage to New Zealand (1768-71) are on show, taken from a collection donated to Auckland by the British Museum in the 1890s. Artist Sydney Parkinson, who travelled with Cook on the Endeavour, drew the plant specimens on board, which were later made into copper plates back in London in the 1770s. A print in Illustrated Leaves is almost a direct link to Parkinson's hand; a copy made in the 1890s from that first series. Parkinson died of dysentery at sea in January 1771, at the age of 26.
The show's only modern example of the art of botanical drawing is also the largest and grandest in the room - The Highgrove Florilegium, commissioned by the estate of the Prince of Wales, with 120 watercolour drawings of plants in Prince Charles' gardens at Highgrove. The two-volume book, which includes three paintings by New Zealand botanical artist Susan Worthington, is also an outstanding example of bookbinding and marbling, and with a print run of just 175 editions, retailed for £11,000 ($24,141) in Britain. (We can't show images from the Florilegium for copyright reasons.)
The exhibition includes examples in the library foyer of more books of botanical art from the museum's collection, but they are just the tip of the tree. As Ralston points out: "The museum library is a major resource - it's not as big as the Turnbull or the Hocken, but it is up in those sort of ranks in terms of its content, and it is the oldest surviving library in Auckland.
"Exhibitions like this are part of an attempt to expose the library to the public a bit more. People just don't know we have a library here or that they can use it and yet it is freely available to anyone."
