Memoranda for Botanical Literacy in the Past and Present

Nature prints of plants are themselves memoranda, marks of the past and present for future consideration. Nature printing can be understood as a scientific and imaginative practice that contributed to the development of the language of modern botany in the western context, of technologies that allowed for the mass printing of concise images of plants in herbals, and of visual and textual languages of plants in poetic and religious calligraphic art between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. A history of nature printing as both an art and science in North America can be traced to northern Europe and Italy in the seventeenth century and prints made by Fabio Colonna in Naples c. 1600, as well as to the influence of poetry and regional botany at the botanical garden of University of Altdorf. These influences were manifested in North America in prints made by Francis Pastorius in Germantown, Pennsylvania, by monastic residents of Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, by Joseph Breintnall in Philadelphia, and Jane Colden in New York, all before 1766. This paper will analyze their botanical prints and drawings as botanography, an art of printing, drawing, and writing plants - and in so doing add a new slant to the consideration of Gardens in Literature and Letters. 

Miranda E Mote is an architect, historian and artist, who is Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2023-24 Garden Club of America / Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize, Landscape Architecture Fellow. While residing at the American Academy in Rome she studied Italian examples of nature prints and related arts, exhibited her own botanical prints at the Academy and Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, taught at three Italian elementary schools, developed DIGS, a K-12 environmental literacy curriculum that uses art to teach language and STEM subjects, and designed a teaching game system, HIVE. In 2022, she established Botanography as a 501c3, non-profit organization to directly serve students and families in Philadelphia County with educational resources. She believes that environmental justice begins with environmental literacy and children. Her own art practice of making botanographs has evolved out of her research. Each series of botanical prints she makes uses historical methods of monotype printing to narrate histories of the entangled lives of people, plants, and places.