Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566,) was a founding father of modern botany, honored to this day in the vivid flower, and corresponding color, Fuchsia. In 1543, Fuchs combined his masterful botanical knowledge with groundbreaking medical research in his New Herbal, a catalog of some 500 types of plants and their healing properties. While a dependable scientific reference, The New Herbal won fame above all with the detail and quality of its illustrations. Alongside essays describing the plants' features, origins, and medicinal powers, Fuchs presented each plant with meticulous woodcut illustrations, refining the ability for swift species identification and setting new standards for accuracy and quality in botanical publications. From the age of great exploration, The New Herbal also documented plant types from the recently discovered New World, offering the first visual record of tobacco, maize, kidney bean, and cactus. This edition is based on Fuchs's personal, hand-colored copy, which has miraculously survived four-and-a-half centuries in pristine condition. Fascinating for historians of medicine and art, gardeners, and anyone interested in herbal medicine, the volume features over 500 splendid illustrations, and an essay exploring the history of healing herbs.

To study a plant in detail is to make a fascinating journey of discovery. Even plants we think we know well will often surprise us as we look at the intricacy of their structure and how they are put together. This fascinating guide explains what flowering plants are and their relationship to other groups of plants. With drawings, paintings and photographs throughout, it advises on how to carry out a botanical study and will prove essential reading for botanical artists, photographers and all those wishing to gain a greater understanding of flowering plants.

Revered by gardeners the world over since they were first introduced into cultivation from Asia over 300 years ago, magnolias have lost none of their allure, with many new introductions beautifying gardens worldwide. Magnolias in Art and Cultivation is the first illustrated book on magnolias and contains information on all species and around 100 hybrids. With over 150 botanical paintings, artist Barbara Oozeerally captures these plants in breathtakingly beautiful detail; described by botanical art collector Dr Shirley Sherwood as 'an extraordinary series of important and beautiful plant portraits'. The informative and authoritative text by Jim Gardiner accompanies these paintings and provides a variety of information about magnolias, including their cultivation; together with Stephen A. Spongberg's full botanical descriptions. This is a truly unique volume which will be sought after by gardener and artist alike! Some of the paintings from the book will be exhibited in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew, 15 January - August 2014.

A unique guide that will teach complete beginners how to paint a beautiful floral watercolour in just one weekend. Beginners recognise that they need to acquire basic painting skills - but at the same time they are eager to produce their first finished painting. This popular 'weekend' formula allows them to do both in a limited amount of time - to build skills gradually and to produce an attractive, frameable painting that they can hang on their walls by the end of the weekend. The author starts by introducing the materials required, and then leads readers through a series of watercolour technique exercises designed to provide a basic grounding in the skills needed for this subject area. This instruction is followed by six weekend projects for painting a range of popular floral subjects: a single flower; a group of white flowers; an indoors still life; an outdoors close-up; autumn flowers; and wild flowers in the landscape. Each course starts with practice exercises to be completed on the Saturday; readers are then ready to complete the full watercolour painting on the Sunday. Clear instructions accompany step-by-step photographs throughout, and technical information is given in special feature boxes.

The Golden Age of Botanical Art brings together the stories of the intrepid explorers - some of whom became botanical artists by default - and the many professional artists who recorded the flora that they discovered on their travels and expeditions. From some of the earliest attempts at art to the plant hunters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the images produced in the study of plants have held a fascination for all those who love nature. Truly global in its scope, this beautifully illustrated book moves across centuries and continents looking at the artistry of China and India, delving into the sketchbooks of explorers in the Himalayas and following the voyages of those who discovered new worlds and new species as far apart as Russia and South America. Alongside special features on key figures in the botanical art world, The Golden Age of Botanical Art highlights the work of some of the great names of botanical art, including Ehret and Bauer. Included within is a host of rarely published and previously unpublished images from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, as well as an outline on how what might have been a pastime for some also made a significant contribution to our understanding of the world and the glories of nature.

The art of Franz and Ferdinand Bauer was praised by the poet and botanist Johann Goethe as the perfect expression of the aims of botanical illustration. The book examines the contrasting lives of Franz (1758-1840), for 50 years the resident artist at Kew Gardens, and Ferdinand (1760-1826) who led a life of travel and adventure as a natural history artist including participating in the historic voyage to Australia of HMS Investigator in the early nineteenth century. It is illustrated with images from the superb archive of Bauer drawings at the Natural History Museum Library, many of which have never been published before. These include beautiful and finely detailed watercolours of flowering plants collected from across the world, pioneering microscopical drawings of plant anatomy and pictures of the newly discovered animals from the coasts of Australia. The book is published to tie-in with a new art exhibition opening at the Natural History Museum in November 2015.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, plants gained great popularity as providers of ideas for artistic form. Collections of designs whose didactic imagery has so far been little researched circulated at art schools and in the applied arts. The book not only makes a contribution to the theory and history of images of plants, but also shows the great topicality of the vegetal in the art of today. It examines notions of cultural renewal, which are always connected with the rhythm of the sprouting, growing, and blooming of plants as well as the political exploitation of flora in the categories of the homegrown and the national. The image of plants thus unfolds at the intersection of botany and aesthetics.

Thanks to the ICT economy, today's world is witnessing a progressive process of transfer and movement from a society founded on the production of merchandise and material goods made by man to a new society driven by sciences and knowledge. This new society utilises human intelligence in an attempt to solve cultural problems, to support activities, to rationalize performance, to plan, to program, and to elaborate strategies and projects for the future.This book, thus, proposes a multifaceted framework where contemporary art, biology, the digital, geology, technology, physiology, chemistry and philosophy enter into debate and complete one another. It revolves around a number of questions which are logically interconnected, such as, "What is bio-art?" "Can a laboratory artist manipulate living things, make complex hybridizations, and give birth to chimeras that would coexist with human beings?" "Do we have the right to use them?" Should we authorize research that will allow the development of these techniques, prohibit it, or finance it?" "Do we have the right to create embryos for transplantation or injection?"