The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Zizania aquatica L.

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 2024.

The 21^st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “Advancing Plant Conservation Through Horticulture,” was held on May 17, 2024. Among the talks was one about conservation action for crop wild relatives. In 1997, Alice Tangerini illustrated this image of Zizania aquatica, southern wild-rice, an important constituent of aquatic plant communities of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast Plains. While not cultivated, Z. aquatica has been grown experimentally. This illustration appeared in Terrell, et al. (SIDA 17: 533-549; 1997). Tangerini made all of her sketches from Ed Terrel’s collections that were collected in Georgia in the early 1970s.  Terrel asked for the usual full size habit and inflorescence but also wanted the details of the spikelet and caryopsis. Tangerini immersed some caryopses of the Zizania in a Petri dish of water and set it on her hot plate to boil so the features would be more discernible. Forgetting this was a grain that people normally cook and eat, she returned later to find a dish of cooked rice ready to eat.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Asteraceae achenes

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.

Many of the urgent identifications that botanists of the National Identification Services (NIS) perform are of Asteraceae achenes, as these are common contaminants of cargo shipments. The botanists must rule out the presence of a Federal Noxious Weed (FNW) species, and many of the designated FNWs are in Asteraceae. Illustrated here are Asteraceae achenes of (150) Bebbia juncea, (151) Tridax procumbens, (152) Dyscritothamnus filifolius, (153) Dimeresia howellii, (154-155) Coreopsis lanceolata, and (156) Bidens pilosa. In 1980, Alice Tangerini illustrated these achenes for Harold Robinson using a technique of polycarbonate pencils on drafting film. The depth of shading with the pencils defined the intricate ridges and hair types of the achenes and provided the best media for publication in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany, No. 51 (1981). She remembers the most laborious part of the illustration was cutting amberliths (silhouettes) around each achene to drop out the gray background—a process no longer necessary with current printing methods.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Vitis californica Benth.

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2024.

California grape is a unique western North American species native to central and northern California and southern Oregon. Recent genomic analyses suggest its ancient hybrid origin involves a maternal extinct parent species that may have given rise to the large speciose Eurasian clade of Vitis.  The leaves of California grape turn beautiful orange and yellow in the fall and the purple fruits are edible but sour.  Many populations of V. californica in the California wine region have hybridized with the wine grape V. vinifera as suggested by the featured article by Nie et al. (2023) in this issue of The Plant Press. The illustration displayed here was based on living cut collections brought by Jun Wen after a trip to Chico, California, in addition to herbarium specimens. One specimen was a collection by USDA illustrator Frederick A. Walpole from 1899. A note on the specimen mentioned a drawing done by Walpole. Alice Tangerini was able to locate the drawing at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, and it was listed as an indefinite loan from the Smithsonian. A scan of the illustration appears on the Hunt website, and it supplied additional information about flower details. Tangerini’s illustration appears in Flora of North America North of Mexico, Vol. 12 – Magnoliophyta: Vitaceae to Garryaceae.

Learning the art of botanical illustration

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2024.

Alice Tangerini presented a lecture and led a botanical illustration class at the Denver Botanic Gardens from October 10-16, 2023. Her lecture, "Botanical Illustration at the Museum," was presented to members of the Garden in person and virtually on Zoom. Along with the lecture, Tangerini displayed several of her botanical drawings showing the techniques used in both traditional and digital media and explained the reasons for choosing the different media.

Alice Tangerini (left) leading a botanical illustration class (right) at the Denver Botanic Gardens in October 2023. Tangerini taught the three-day class to 14 students using the Gardens' collections of Helianthus annuus, including living cut flowers and herbarium specimens as subjects.
(photos courtesy of the School of Botanical Art and Illustration, Denver Botanic Gardens)

Tangerini then taught a three-day class, Botanical Portraits in Layered Media, to 14 students at the Gardens using the Gardens' collections of Helianthus annuus, including living cut flowers and herbarium specimens, as subjects. She spent a day selecting flowering material from the Gardens that was also available as herbarium specimens that could be photocopied for the class.

"Sunflower" by Brittany Hass. The Gardens' collections of Helianthus annuus, including living cut flowers and herbarium specimens, served as subjects. Image courtesy of the artist.

The class media included a combination of graphite pencils designed for use on translucent drafting film where the class traced the photocopies to achieve a quicker rendition of the Helianthus. An underlying layer on film using opaque watercolor and colored pencil supplied the color to achieve a lifelike depiction of the subject. The class produced successful illustrations and the students discovered media that could be applied to other plant subjects. The Denver Botanic Gardens was an especially interesting place to visit at that time of year. It was decorated for Halloween and a fall festival held at the end of October.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Aframomum angustifolium (Sonn.) K.Schum.

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2023.

This illustration by Alice Tangerini was completed in 1995 and based on living specimens in the Botany Research Greenhouse grown from collections by John Kress. Tangerini visited the greenhouses a number of times to make dissections and illustrate the flowers and habit. It was one of her early drawings of Zingiberales and included details of the flowers with cross sections of the ovary and anthers. Aframomum angustifolium is an endemic species from tropical Africa and was collected by Kress in Madagascar. The drawing was exhibited at the 4^th International Symposium on the Family Zingiberaceae held at the Singapore Botanical Gardens in July 2006 attended by Kress. Along with several other of Tangerini’s illustrations of gingers, it was framed and admired by many of the attendees. In an effort to have all the drawings in Botany imaged and databased, the framed illustration was turned over to intern Erin Ellis for scanning. Ellis’ expertise in scanning as well as cleaning dust and stray pencil lines resulted in a high-quality reproduction of the original.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Heliconia terciopela W.J.Kress & Betancur

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 3, July 2023.

The Neotropical flora was the theme of the 20^th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, which was held on May 19, 2023. One species among the flora is Heliconia terciopela, which is endemic to a small region of lowland wet forest on the Pacific coast of Colombia. The name “terciopela” is Spanish for “velvet,” which refers to the smooth, short, uniform pubescence that covers the inflorescence. It also signifies the primary forest habitats where this species of Heliconia and the highly poisonous snake Botrops asper, locally known as “terciopelo” or fer-de-lance, are both found. Alice Tangerini drew this illustration in 1992 using unmounted dried specimens including leaves and an inflorescence. She reconstructed it into its more natural appearance with the help of slides of the living plant. Dissections were made with the Wild M5 microscope and reduced to fit the page format. The finished drawing was in pen and ink on Cronaflex drafting film without any digital recomposition. A partial detail of stamens was cut from the final inked image as it did not reveal any necessary information. The illustration was included along with four other drawings of Heliconia in the 1993 issue of Caldasia.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Causonis japonica (Thunb.) Raf.

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

Causonis japonica (Vitaceae) is the type species of the genus Causonis Raf., which was recently resurrected as a segregate of the genus Cayratia Juss. based on phylogenetic and morphological evidence. The species is widely distributed in eastern Asia (Japan, Korea, and China) and southeast Asia (the Philippines and Vietnam). Alice Tangerini’s illustration used three collections as resource material: the habit was reconstructed from a collection by Mac Alford, former intern in Botany, (Mississippi, 2002), the flower was reconstructed from a Fumihiro Konta collection (Tokyo, 1997), and the bud and floral disk were from Jun Wen’s pickled material (Yunnan, 2014). Wen also supplied digital images of the habit and inflorescence which aided in making a more natural appearance. The illustration had to be reduced to a 3-inch format for Flora of North America; thus, all figures were sized to fit an 8 x 12 inch plate and the reproduction, happily, kept all of the linework.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Muhlenbergia jaime-hintonii P.M.Peterson & Valdés-Reyna

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.

When first described in 1999 from collections from southern Aramberri in southern Nuevo León, México, Paul Peterson suggested Muhlenbergia jaime-hintonii resided in M. subg. Trichochloa, perhaps related to M. pubigluma since both species share a dense white pubescence below the basal nodes, short-leafy rhizomes, reddish-gray spikelets, and faintly-3-veined lemmas. However, after producing a phylogeny based on DNA sequence markers in 2010, 2018, and 2021, M. jaime-hintonii was found on an isolated branch embedded within species residing in M. subg. Pseudosporobolus near other wide-ranging species from the Great Basin and Eastern North America.

Alice Tangerini inked the plate using the Gillott crowquills on drafting film. The illustration marked the initial scanning at high resolution for artwork in the department. The drawing was scanned at 1200 dpi which was twice the former scan resolution of 600 dpi. Tangerini spoke with Barney Lipscomb, SIDA’s editor, and requested the high resolution for the page. Lipscomb agreed to 1000 dpi which was all they could handle and the file was then reproduced in bitmap to keep the file size small. The resulting reproduction in SIDA (18: 686; 1999) looked very sharp and set the standard for all following illustrations.

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.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Tibouchina fraterna N.E. Br.

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.

Found on tepuis, the table form mountains of the Guayana Shield, Tibouchina fraterna (Melastomataceae) is an exceptional plant from an exceptional place—the theme of the 19^th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, which was held at the National Museum of Natural History on May 13, 2022. Native to Guyana and south Venezuela, T. fraterna has been found on Mount Auyán, Mount Duida, and Mount Roraima. Tibouchina fraternal was one of a series of melastome drawings Alice Tangerini drew for John Wurdack in 1987, published in the Flora of the Guianas treatment of the Melastomataceae. The narrow page format encouraged Tangerini to illustrate many of the floral characters overlapping parts of the habit with leaf surface details placed underneath the habit. This format style continued until software allowed for scanning and layout digitally. A remark by a reviewer on one of the melastome drawing copies was, “A beautiful illustration! It would be nice to have additional species illustrated like this”.