This book is the product of a fortuitous meeting and collaborations made possible by two great institutions: The New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library and Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and to them the authors are deeply grateful. It all started with an idea that occurred to Bobbi Angell. Having drawn plants for botanists for more than forty years, Bobbi had long appreciated and been influenced by historical botanical art, admiring the rare books and artwork at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and other institutions. A visit to Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) several years ago was a new and amazing treat, with Librarian Tony Willis giving her a grand tour of beautiful manuscripts in the collection. This refreshing view of paintings by both renowned and unknown artists inspired an idea of elaborating a historical text with historical art. Her immediate thought was to draw upon artwork from OSGF’s incredible collections to illuminate climbing plants, more than 100 species of which are discussed in On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants by Charles Darwin, a book of painstaking research and insights that she felt deserved a display of beautiful contemporaneous artwork. Sir Peter Crane, President of Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Tony Willis, Head Librarian, were enthusiastic from the first suggestion, and Bobbi was enthralled with the idea of sifting through books and manuscripts at OSGF to match up with all the plants Darwin studied.
Bobbi’s idea led to an opportunity to meet Jim Costa at NYBG, where he had the good fortune to be immersed in the wonderful C. F. Cox Collection of Darwiniana in the Mertz Library as a Mellon Visiting Scholar. They met for coffee one fine day, and Bobbi bounced the idea: a book on Darwin’s fascinating work with climbing plants, illustrated with beautiful and historically significant botanical artwork. Jim thought it was novel and exciting, as any fellow self-confessed Darwin and plant nerd would agree—what a neat way to spotlight Darwin’s fascinating and creative experimental work with climbers as well as illustrate the diversity and beauty of these plants as seen through artists’ eyes.
Together we proposed the idea to Tom Fischer at Timber Press, who enthusiastically suggested we expand our ideas, focusing not just on Climbing Plants, but all six of Darwin’s botanical books—a prospect exciting and daunting in equal measure. Bobbi then had the challenging task of picking and choosing among the many wonderful plants studied by Darwin that were also represented in Bunny Mellon’s fabulous botanical art collection, ultimately selecting forty-five species that represent the range of Darwin’s botanical investigations, with selected passages from his writings that exemplify his working method and insights. Jim took the lead on the general introduction and writing accounts for each plant, highlighting Darwin’s interest and methods in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, and aspects of the plant’s natural history, ecology, and evolution more generally.
Although we both began this project as plant lovers, Darwin taught us much more about plants than we could have imagined, inspiring a deeper appreciation for everything from mechanistic structure, function, and physiology to adaptation and variation in an evolutionary context. Delving into Darwin’s working method was equally illuminating. We hope that the marriage of art and science that we present here will inspire readers to see plants—too often considered mere background or admired solely for the beauty of flower or foliage—in a new light altogether: beautiful, yes, but also as exquisitely adapted organisms with a rich evolutionary history. We hope, too, that we will help inspire a new appreciation for beautiful botanical art and beautiful science, and the creative eye and spirit that underlie both.