[PCA] Women in Science: Botanical Illustrators

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

Debra Jane Carey is a Certified Botanical Artist whose work captures the 
beauty of the natural world using modern techniques.  Here's a tidbit from 
her website:

A History of Scientific Illustration
The recording of botany began in the form of words. Plants were grown and 
described verbally in books called herbals. Hippocrates, the father of 
medicine, (460-410 B.C.) is among the earliest of the Greeks who wrote of 
plants. Theophrastus of Eresius (370-286 B.C.), also Greek, has the title 
father of botany. The herbal produced by Theophrastus following 
Hippocrates was copied word for word by many botanists.

While most women hired to illustrate did so from conservatories and dried 
specimens, Margaret Ursula Mee (1909-1988) broke out of the box. She 
traveled from her home in England to the Amazon. Margaret first taught, 
and then became the botanical artist at Instituto Botanica in San Paulo, 
Brazil. One of the first institutes established in South America. Her 
plant explorations and collections produced three books on Amazonian 
flora.

See the full story at: 
http://www.interactionart.com/History%20of%20Scientific%20Illustration.htm







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