The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Vitis rotundifolia Michaux

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

Vitis rotundifolia, or muscadine, is a grape species from the southern USA commonly used as fruits or for cooking and making jelly, juice, and wine. It is a close relative of Vitis popenoei from Mexico and adjacent regions. Alice Tangerini used a variety of herbarium specimens for her drawing, taking advantage of many specimens collected by Jun Wen. Images of the living plant and fruit were numerous on the web and were used to convey a more natural appearance of Vitis in the drawing. The illustration appears in The Flora of North America: North of Mexico (Vol. 12 Magnioliophyta: Vitaceae to Garryaceae). Tangerini was challenged to reduce the drawing to a small size to fit the FNA format. The illustration was also selected for the t-shirt design by the FNA group for Botany 2016.

Summer internships

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

This summer, Sundre Winslow, an intern participating in the Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE), worked on a research project, “Tropical to Temperate Transitions in the Genus Prunus” with Richard Hodel, Jun Wen, and Elizabeth Zimmer. Winslow presented her findings at an NHRE symposium in the museum on August 4.

From June 20 to August 12, Alice Tangerini supervised summer intern to botany, Abigail (Abbey) Paradis. Paradis organized, labeled, and made folders for the hundreds of Cuatrecasas illustrations in the Botanical Art Collection, scanned 40 drawings to fulfill a request from a researcher, scanned 25 other new drawings for the Botanical Art Collection and helped scan and organize Poaceae drawings dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Using Adobe software, Paradis was able to optimize the resolution and improve images of the scans. She used Photoshop to improve digital photos for publications. She also illustrated a living specimen collected by Jason Grant from the SI Botanical Research Greenhouses that had been photographed by Leslie Brothers and vouchered but not yet identified. Her drawing, along with images of the specimens, proved it to be Commelina tuberosa from Ecuador, and has now been added to the Botanical Art Collection.

Staff activities

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

On September 7, John Kress gave an invited presentation, “Biodiversity exploration, species discovery, and new technologies: Plant humanities in a rapidly changing world,” at the Plant Humanities Conference at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. The conference explored the deep, complex, and asymmetrical relationship between plants and people. Plants are indispensable to our bodily needs­—food, shelter, clothing, medicine—and weave themselves into our experience through ritual, religion, and art. Yet anthropogenic change threatens two out of five plant species with extinction. These pressing environmental challenges make an urgent call for a new dialogue between the humanities and science to point us to vital future directions for scholarship and action. Kress’ presentation was one of three during a panel on the environment and biodiversity. The 3-day event was open to the public and livestreamed.

On August 22, 2022, Alice Tangerini gave a lecture, “Botanical Illustration, Then and Now,” to the Nantucket Conservation Foundation of Massachusetts. She covered a brief history of botanical illustration leading up to present and showing images from the collection of the NMNH Department of Botany. She presented a summary of collecting plants for the herbarium and the drawing process. The audience included gardeners, artists, and architects. After Tangerini explained the use of architectural tools in scientific illustration, one of the architects in attendance offered Tangerini her tools of the trade since she had retired and was looking for an interested party to take them. The next day the architect bicycled to the home where Tangerini was staying and delivered a bag of a variety of leads and holders which Tangerini very much appreciated.