Springtime in New York - Current and Coming - Plants and Garden's Portrayed: Rare and Illustrated Books from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, May, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

When spring is in full flower in New York City the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx is at its best. The formal and woodland gardens are a calm oasis, seemingly far from the bustling city. Less well known than the gardens is the institution's leading role as this country's epicenter for plant research, which makes it a mecca for those interested in botanical studies.

On May 2 the botanical garden opens its new International Plant Science Center. This large project includes n new facility for the garden's William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, which is the largest plant research collection in the Western Hemisphere; the renovated and expanded LuEsther T. Mertz Library; and the new William D. Rondina and Giovanni Foroni LoFaro Library Exhibition Gallery. The renovation and expansion were carried out by Polshek Partnership Architects, and the designer for the exhibition gallery is Stephen Saitas Designs. The restoration architect for the exterior of the Mertz Library is Cabrera Barricklo Architects.

Scholars have long known about the extraordinary holdings of the library which was founded in 1899. The library building was designed by Robert Williams Gibson and completed in 1901. The inaugural show for the new exhibition gallery is entitled Plants and Garden's Portrayed: Rare and Illustrated Books from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library and may be seen until July 31. More than 60 works are on view, drawn from the collection of some 775,000 printed and non-printed works in thirty languages and ranging in date from 1190 to 1884. In addition, the library houses more than a mile of archival materials.

The exhibition begins with the Italian manuscript Circa Instans, which dates to 1190 and is the earliest known document in which a scholar attempted to establish a standard for plant names. The manuscript is attributed to the teaching physician Matthaeus Platearius, who was affiliated with the School of Medicine in Salerno, Italy, then Europe's premier medical institution. It delineates formulas for medicines and identifies the plant, animal, and mineral ingredients needed to concoct them. Representing another milestone in this section of the exhibition is a copy of Hye nach volget das Puch der Natur by Konrad von Megenberg, which was printed in Augsburg in 1475. A survey of all that was then known about natural history, it contains the first printed image of a plant used to illustrate a text.

The second section pertains to expeditions to discover remote civilizations, plants, and animals. The history of botanical exploration is extremely well documented, and the Mertz Library has excellent holdings in this area. The third section of the exhibition examines the art of botanical illustration, which was flourishing by the sixteenth century. One of the signature works on view is a copy of Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis, first published in 1613. Besler an apothecary spent sixteen years executing the exacting drawings from which the engravings were made. The specimens he drew in remarkable detail depict more than one thousand flowers, representing more than six hundred different species. All of them were from the gardens planted for Johann Conrad von Gemmingen, prince bishop of Eichstatt, with Besler's assistance at the Eichstatt castle near Nuremberg.

The next section, devoted to the design and structure of gardens, includes manuals and proposed designs from the sixteenth century forward. By the eighteenth century garden design had emerged as a specialty and the professionals frequently executed elaborate drawings and watercolors for potential patrons. In England Humphry Repton prepared unique books for his patrons, which are now commonly referred to as "Red Books," so named for the color of their bindings. On view in the exhibition is an autographed example executed in 1795 and 1796 for Whitton, a country house owned by Samuel Prime.

A section devoted to American native trees surveys eighteenth-century depictions by such leading artists as Mark Catesby and works inspired by the findings of Asa Gray and William Barton, who were well-known botanists in the following century Finally a section devoted to fruits and vegetables includes depictions of both tropical and native cultivars that were known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The catalogue of the exhibition, written by Elizabeth S. Eustis, John F. Reed, and David L Andrews, is available by telephoning 718-8178869.