The Temple of Flora is perhaps the most famous florilegium or book of flowers from the golden age of botanical illustration. It's a charming collection of deliberately idiosyncratic flower portraits that became the portrait of a nation.
In the last several years, artists have reclaimed moss as a medium, creating site-specific installations to reclaim public spaces, and creating a new sort of growing, living graffiti.
Albrecht Dürer's paintings are accurate depictions of native plants and weeds, and a rare example of art showing plants in their natural environment in the 16th century.
It takes a village to grow a picture in a rice field: Since 1993, a small Japanese village has been creating rice paddy art, in an effort to increase tourism. It's a hybrid of traditional illustration and crop circles, with canvases that are as large as football fields.
Maps to the stars! No, wait, maps to...fruit trees? The Los Angeles-based group Fallen Fruit created maps of the city's fruit trees, a reminder that Los Angeles was once organized by boulevards of orchards, not Hollywood and Sunset. It's little locavore, a little urban farmer, and it's a new way to understand a city.
Biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel introduced the term "ecology," and pursued his study of the natural world with a scientist's rigor and an artist's philosophy. He traveled around the world to find botanic specimens and illustrated them as perfect forms and unifying patterns.
An exhibit of contemporary topiary pieces is on display at this year's International Horticulture Expo, in Xi’an, China. The menagerie of living sculptures includes the country's national bird, a giant panda, and a cow.
Steven N. Meyers, a medical X-ray technologist, uses radiography techniques to botanic specimens, capturing the elegant portraits of plants and their insides that would otherwise go unseen.
At the University of Stuttgart, Germany, a new architectural discipline is evolving, with leaves, branches, and roots. The research group is called Baubotanik (Botanic Architecture), and it is where the architects are gardeners, and the plants are architects.
