Kew Gardens
On Monday I went to Kew Gardens to do some biological and historical research on seeds, especially their composition and their dispersal mechanisms and how far they travel.
I was rather disappointed to say the least...at this time of year I wasn't expecting much to be in flower, but I wasn't expecting 3/4 of the facilities to be closed for maintenance/refurbishment before the Easter weekend (there wasn't even a discount on entry!) so there wasn't much to see or do.
Most of the information I managed to glean from here came from books in the gift shop!
I did find inspiration in a few things though:
I had already been thinking of covering enforced migration - slavery - in the human parallel of my project, however I hadn't fully realised the extent to which exactly the same has happened with plants. The plant hunters of the 19th Century sought plants and seeds from all over the world and brought them back to Britain to see if they could grow them over here. when seeds wouldn't grow in our climate, attempts were made to recreate the conditions under which the plants would grow in their natural environments, such as the Palm House at Kew with the steam pipes keeping the humidity and temperatures high as they would be in the tropics.
If you can't enlarge the photo of the plaque in order to be able to read it, it says that this tree is an Oriental Plane, planted here in 1762. It would have originally stood next to the White House - a royal palace which is no longer standing, to provide shelter from the summer sun. As the tree was brought over from the Eastern Mediterranean (Turkey/Iran), it was not expected to grow very well in the British climate, so wouldn't grow too tall...oops! 😀
Also, on the canopy walk were some plaques which got me thinking:
What initially caught my eye is the brass & verdigris - one of my favourite things - I am a total sucker for copper or brass and the lovely green blue patina it gets when exposed to the elements! I want to look into whether it is possible to achieve this look artificially/quickly.
The first plaque reads "A Jay can bury 5,000 acorns in autumn"
The second: "Tree seeds have been delivered by helicopter for millions of years"
The third: "Tree roots are twice as wide as the tree is tall, but only a metre deep".
The first and second plaques makes me think of how many different ways seeds disperse their seed. Initially you think of the obvious ones - dandelion clocks and poppy heads using the wind to disperse their seeds. A short distance for poppy seed which is tiny and light, but further for the dandelions with their little fluffy parachute like appendages to help them travel further. But some rely on birds and squirrels to pick them up, take them away & bury them, or to attach to their fur with tiny hooks. Some travel by water. Some need to be frozen or burnt in fire to germinate. Some are hidden in tasty fruit to be eaten and deposited far away in bird poop, the digestion process being required to break down the casing of the seed in order for it to be able to germinate! I have looked at the Kew website and found their formal list of methods of seed dispersal:
The third one was something I hadn't considered - it's obvious when you think about it, but in my mind roots are kind of ball shaped and go as deep as they spread across. WRONG! Roots main function is to absorb water and nutrients from the soil, but they also stabilise the plant and keep it from blowing over in the wind. The soil density increases the further down you go, so roots would struggle to push through & extract the nutrients they need. I found further information here:
https://www.trees.org.uk/kenticotrees/Trees.org.uk/files/61/6181f2b7-e35d-4075-832f-5e230d16aa9e.pdf
Sadly the library and galleries were closed, so I had a mooch through the books in the giftshop for more information. I found a great book on seeds and took photo's of a few pages (naughty I know, but having paid £24 to get in, I didn't really want to spend another £20 on a book from which I needed a tiny amount of information! The book is called "The Book of Seeds: A Lifesize Guide to 600 Species from Around the World" by Dr Paul Smith - published by Ivy Press 1st February 2018.
Honesty seeds and seed pods are so beautiful and perfect for an artist to get their teeth into. I have already taken some photo's of some that I collected last year and made a sketch for my initial page in my sketchbook. As such, I found this article very interesting. As a keen gardener, I was aware of most of this, however I didn't know that it was popular in the 19th century to paint on the seedpods, so that will be another experiment to add to my list 😀 I knew that you could add the leaves and flowers to salads as they have a cabagey taste, but I didn't know that the seeds could be crushed and used as a mustard substitute. This sparked the idea of looking into whether any seeds could be used as paints or dyes, but I could only find information on using plants and flowers for this purpose rather than the seeds.
I also found a scientific explanation of the anatomy of a seed. A seed is basically the same as an egg - made up of an embryo and a food source contained within a shell. It gets a lot more complicated than that when the seed starts to grow, with the embryo separating into the parts of plants that we recognise as leaves, stems and roots, but this is a study for artistic purposes, not a biology qualification so we'll leave it at that! I also found some information on when humans moved from gathering seed to farming seed, but I will cover that in later blog posts about the parallels between human and seed migration.
After the gift shop, we then hopped back on the tube & headed to the Natural History Museum...blog post to follow...
Once home, I did some internet research on Kew and found the following (from Wikipedia as the Kew Website gives no information on the history, just the current science projects and attractions. Frankly it is a very unhelpful website as well as a disappointing place to visit! I know Wikipedia is a frowned upon resource, but it was the best I could do!):
Kew was adopted as a national botanical garden in 1840, however the origins of Kew Gardens can be traced to the merging of the royal estates of Richmond and Kew in 1772. William Chambers built several garden structures, including the lofty Chinese pagoda built in 1761 which still remains. George III enriched the gardens, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks.
Sir Joseph Banks (1743 - 1820) was an English naturalist, botanist and patron of the natural sciences and sailed on the Endeavour with Captain Cook, together with botanical artist Sydney Parkinson. Sir Joseph Banks was responsible for making Kew the worlds leading botanical gardens that it is today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Gardens#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks
It is, however, the work of Sydney Parkinson that interests me. "He was the first European artist to
draw and paint plants collected from places on the exploratory voyages set foot on Australian soil,
to draw an authentic Australian landscape, and to portray the indigenous people from direct observation. Significantly, Banks's Florilegium would not exist without the work that Sydney Parkinson carried out as botanical artist on the Endeavour." - taken from botanical art & artists website. you can find out more here:
https://www.botanicalartandartists.com/sydney-parkinson.html
I will look into his work in my next blog post as I found out much more information on him at The Natural History Museum.
I was rather disappointed to say the least...at this time of year I wasn't expecting much to be in flower, but I wasn't expecting 3/4 of the facilities to be closed for maintenance/refurbishment before the Easter weekend (there wasn't even a discount on entry!) so there wasn't much to see or do.
Most of the information I managed to glean from here came from books in the gift shop!
I did find inspiration in a few things though:
I had already been thinking of covering enforced migration - slavery - in the human parallel of my project, however I hadn't fully realised the extent to which exactly the same has happened with plants. The plant hunters of the 19th Century sought plants and seeds from all over the world and brought them back to Britain to see if they could grow them over here. when seeds wouldn't grow in our climate, attempts were made to recreate the conditions under which the plants would grow in their natural environments, such as the Palm House at Kew with the steam pipes keeping the humidity and temperatures high as they would be in the tropics.
If you can't enlarge the photo of the plaque in order to be able to read it, it says that this tree is an Oriental Plane, planted here in 1762. It would have originally stood next to the White House - a royal palace which is no longer standing, to provide shelter from the summer sun. As the tree was brought over from the Eastern Mediterranean (Turkey/Iran), it was not expected to grow very well in the British climate, so wouldn't grow too tall...oops! 😀
Also, on the canopy walk were some plaques which got me thinking:
What initially caught my eye is the brass & verdigris - one of my favourite things - I am a total sucker for copper or brass and the lovely green blue patina it gets when exposed to the elements! I want to look into whether it is possible to achieve this look artificially/quickly.
The first plaque reads "A Jay can bury 5,000 acorns in autumn"
The second: "Tree seeds have been delivered by helicopter for millions of years"
The third: "Tree roots are twice as wide as the tree is tall, but only a metre deep".
The first and second plaques makes me think of how many different ways seeds disperse their seed. Initially you think of the obvious ones - dandelion clocks and poppy heads using the wind to disperse their seeds. A short distance for poppy seed which is tiny and light, but further for the dandelions with their little fluffy parachute like appendages to help them travel further. But some rely on birds and squirrels to pick them up, take them away & bury them, or to attach to their fur with tiny hooks. Some travel by water. Some need to be frozen or burnt in fire to germinate. Some are hidden in tasty fruit to be eaten and deposited far away in bird poop, the digestion process being required to break down the casing of the seed in order for it to be able to germinate! I have looked at the Kew website and found their formal list of methods of seed dispersal:
- Ballistic dispersal — methods originating from parent plant or diaspore; explosive mechanism
- Barochory — unassisted; seeds drop to the ground close to or beneath the parent plant
- Chamaechory — wind; diaspore is rolled along ground surface by wind
- Dyszoochory — animal; diaspore is eaten intentionally
- Endozoochory — animal; diaspore is eaten intentionally/diaspore is eaten accidentally
- Epizoochory/adhesive dispersal - animal; diaspore is carried accidentally
- Geocarpy — dispersal prevented; seeds are produced below ground level
- Meteoranemochory — wind; diaspore is blown by wind
- Myrmecochory — animal; diaspore is carried intentionally; ants
- Nautohydrochory — water; e.g. floating/submerged in fresh/saltwater currents
- Ombrohydrochory — water; diaspore is propelled by action of rain on plant structure/wetting by rain or dew
- Synzoochory — animal; diaspore is carried intentionally
- Xerochasy/hygrochasy — water; wetting by rain or dew
The third one was something I hadn't considered - it's obvious when you think about it, but in my mind roots are kind of ball shaped and go as deep as they spread across. WRONG! Roots main function is to absorb water and nutrients from the soil, but they also stabilise the plant and keep it from blowing over in the wind. The soil density increases the further down you go, so roots would struggle to push through & extract the nutrients they need. I found further information here:
https://www.trees.org.uk/kenticotrees/Trees.org.uk/files/61/6181f2b7-e35d-4075-832f-5e230d16aa9e.pdf
Sadly the library and galleries were closed, so I had a mooch through the books in the giftshop for more information. I found a great book on seeds and took photo's of a few pages (naughty I know, but having paid £24 to get in, I didn't really want to spend another £20 on a book from which I needed a tiny amount of information! The book is called "The Book of Seeds: A Lifesize Guide to 600 Species from Around the World" by Dr Paul Smith - published by Ivy Press 1st February 2018.
Honesty seeds and seed pods are so beautiful and perfect for an artist to get their teeth into. I have already taken some photo's of some that I collected last year and made a sketch for my initial page in my sketchbook. As such, I found this article very interesting. As a keen gardener, I was aware of most of this, however I didn't know that it was popular in the 19th century to paint on the seedpods, so that will be another experiment to add to my list 😀 I knew that you could add the leaves and flowers to salads as they have a cabagey taste, but I didn't know that the seeds could be crushed and used as a mustard substitute. This sparked the idea of looking into whether any seeds could be used as paints or dyes, but I could only find information on using plants and flowers for this purpose rather than the seeds.
I also found a scientific explanation of the anatomy of a seed. A seed is basically the same as an egg - made up of an embryo and a food source contained within a shell. It gets a lot more complicated than that when the seed starts to grow, with the embryo separating into the parts of plants that we recognise as leaves, stems and roots, but this is a study for artistic purposes, not a biology qualification so we'll leave it at that! I also found some information on when humans moved from gathering seed to farming seed, but I will cover that in later blog posts about the parallels between human and seed migration.
After the gift shop, we then hopped back on the tube & headed to the Natural History Museum...blog post to follow...
Once home, I did some internet research on Kew and found the following (from Wikipedia as the Kew Website gives no information on the history, just the current science projects and attractions. Frankly it is a very unhelpful website as well as a disappointing place to visit! I know Wikipedia is a frowned upon resource, but it was the best I could do!):
Kew was adopted as a national botanical garden in 1840, however the origins of Kew Gardens can be traced to the merging of the royal estates of Richmond and Kew in 1772. William Chambers built several garden structures, including the lofty Chinese pagoda built in 1761 which still remains. George III enriched the gardens, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks.
Sir Joseph Banks (1743 - 1820) was an English naturalist, botanist and patron of the natural sciences and sailed on the Endeavour with Captain Cook, together with botanical artist Sydney Parkinson. Sir Joseph Banks was responsible for making Kew the worlds leading botanical gardens that it is today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Gardens#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks
It is, however, the work of Sydney Parkinson that interests me. "He was the first European artist to
draw and paint plants collected from places on the exploratory voyages set foot on Australian soil,
to draw an authentic Australian landscape, and to portray the indigenous people from direct observation. Significantly, Banks's Florilegium would not exist without the work that Sydney Parkinson carried out as botanical artist on the Endeavour." - taken from botanical art & artists website. you can find out more here:
https://www.botanicalartandartists.com/sydney-parkinson.html
I will look into his work in my next blog post as I found out much more information on him at The Natural History Museum.
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