Stunning 19th-Century Flower Paintings by the Forgotten Artist and Poet Clarissa Munger Badger – The Marginalian

“To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her prescient ode to the interconnectedness of nature, “is profound accountability.”

A passionate lifelong gardener, the poet had fallen beneath the spell of wildflowers whereas composing her astonishing herbarium as a teen. Nevertheless it was an uncommonly lovely e book her father gave her simply earlier than she turned thirty — not lengthy after she wrote to an ill-suited suitor, “My flowers don’t know the way far my ideas wander off typically.” — that fueled her poetic ardour for nature’s personal backyard: Wild Flowers Drawn and Colored from Nature (public library) by the botanical artist and poet Clarissa Munger Badger (Might 20, 1806–December 14, 1889).

Revealed the yr On the Origin of Species shook science and artistically modeled on The Moral of Flowers, with which the poet and painter Rebecca Hey had enchanted English readers 1 / 4 century earlier, Badger’s e book contained twenty-two beautiful scientifically correct work of widespread New England wildflower species — violets and harebells, the rhododendron and the honeysuckle — every paired with a poem bridging the botanical and the existential: some by titans like Percival and Longfellow, some by long-forgotten poets of her time and place, some by Badger herself.

For a style of her fusion of playfulness and poignancy, here’s a fragment from Badger’s ode to the rhododendron — a flowering surprise that was right here when the dinosaurs roamed Earth, lengthy earlier than small warm-blooded mammals with giant minds and poetic hearts developed the opposable the thumbs to color flowers and the consciousness to ponder the meaning of life in a flower:

I cost thee, flower, of magnificence born,
Raise not thy head too excessive,
For, just like the lowliest of thy race,
Thou, too, wert born to die.

The Energy that lifts thee to the solar,
And bends thee to the gale,
Doth watch, with equal care and love,
The Lily of the vale.

Seven years later, as Bronson Alcott was considering the relationship between gardening and genius whereas elevating his visionary daughter a state over in New England and Ernst Haeckel was coining the word ecology, Clarissa Munger Badger gave her wildflower masterpiece a home counterpart in Floral Belles from the Green-House and Garden (public library | public domain).

Bringing her brush to the fantastic thing about the pansy and the lily, the day-blazing geranium and the night-blooming cactus, the tulip and the rose, and as soon as once more pairing her work with poems, she celebrated backyard flowers as “good hopes, all woven in beautiful tissues,” as “stars… whereby we learn our historical past” — a vibrant testomony to Oliver Sacks’s clinically substantiated perception in the healing power of gardens.

Couple with these gorgeous French botanical drawings of some of Earth’s most otherworldly plants from Badger’s epoch, then leap ahead a century with pioneering plant ecologist Edith Clements’s Rocky Mountain wildflower drawings, then leap again two with the self-taught artist and botanist Elizabeth Blackwell’s gorgeous illustrations from the world’s first pictorial encyclopedia of medicinal vegetation, then straddle the centuries with this layered reflection on flowers and the meaning of life, starring Emily Dickinson and The Little Prince, then slake your soul on this.