Linda’s botanical art comes from a scientific perspective. She has illustrated hundreds of species for floras and botanical monographs. Here she presents several images of one of her favorite groups of plants, the sunflower family (Asteraceae) and contrasts these with the blues of, for example, Delphinium, Camas, Gentiana, and Brodiaea. And of course she includes images of her other favorite groups, ferns and orchids, and examples of her illustrations of Channel Islands flora.

The exhibit is open during library hours August 2-28. Please join Linda on Monday, August 5, for a 5-7 pm reception in the library; light refreshments will be served.

Have you used the Garden, Landscape and Horticulture Index from EBSCO? This resource, available on the Miller Library public computer terminals, helps you find magazine and journal articles on an array of garden-related topics. For help locating the articles online or in print, check our catalog for the journal title or ask a librarian.

In form, the book calls to mind children’s books of centuries past, which were meant as vehicles of moral education. This aim is true here, too, but the content is distinctive for its intense focus on plant discovery and naming in the historical context of conquest, colonial exploitation, and slavery. This book is a necessary counter-narrative to traditional white Eurocentric perspectives on botany and human-plant relationships.

Kincaid is known for her literary style and her deep botanical knowledge; Walker is best known for her silhouettes and large art installations that both employ and transform racist imagery of past eras. Though each alphabetical entry is brief, all are dense with layers of meaning. Kincaid’s sentences twist and turn as they disentangle a plant’s context. Here are excerpts from the Amaranth entry:

“When the Spaniards were not committing genocide against the peoples they met, who had made a comfortable life for themselves and created extraordinary, glorious monuments to their civilizations, they were forcing them to abandon this source of physical and spiritual nourishment and replace it with barley wheat, and other European grains. This, along with many other cruelties, led to the decline of the Aztecs and the Inca.” Contemporary gardeners are not immune to a bit of sly critique: “Some gardeners, when reflecting on its [amaranth’s] history and its appearance in their garden as an ornamental, have a very fleeting debate within themselves over the ethics of growing food as an ornamental.”

This is an excerpt. Read Rebecca's full review on our website.