THE PRESSED PLANT
The Art of Botanical Specimens, Nature Prints, and Sun Pictures
Andrea DiNoto & David Winter, 1999

Real plants captured in paper gardens are the focus of The Pressed Plant, the first book to examine artwork created with the plant itself.

Lavishly illustrated and containing examples that range from the eighteenth to the twentieth century—many never before published—here is a fascinating view of the naural world, beautifully preserved.

Grass, flower, seaweed, leaf—every plant is a perfect form. When pressed to paper, its perfection is dramatically captured and revealed—as a work of nature, but with a kinship to art.

The Pressed Plant is the first book to demonstrate this aesthetic phenomenon through hundreds of stunning illustrations that date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, most of which have never before been published.

Part One: The Plant Collected, shows real plants of astonishing beauty that have been collected, pressed and mounted by botanists or by amateurs, as single sheets or bound into books called herbaria. The anecdotal text relates the intriguing and romantic story of plant collections, as a hazardous natural science in uncharted territories, as a genteel Victorian pasttime, and as the serious pursuit of a remarkable group of nineteenth-century women botanists.

Part Two: The Plant's Impression, shows and describes rare and classic examples of both nature prints, in which the plant is inked, pressed, and printed, and sun pictures, produced when a plant is placed on light sensitive paper and exposed to the sun.

An afterword looks at how botanical materials are used in unusual works by leading contemporary artists, while detailed appendices describe methods of botanical specimen collecting and mounting, materials and suppliers, and botanical institutions and museums worldwide.

The Pressed Plant presents a fascinating view of the natural world, beautifully preserved.

This book is available through amazon.com.