A Flora
Susan Allix

The book contains 23 prints, two original watercolours and hand-made paper, some with flower specimens woven in by the artist. The original coverboards by Allix, are in dark green and purple morocco, and silk and suede violet onlays in the form of an iris, with flower specimen endpapers. The book is designed around fragments and extracts about flowers from writers and poets throughout the centuries including Sappho, John Evelyn, Dumas, and Pirandello.

Of Wildflowers Eva Faulkes

A speculative discourse on the origins of names of wildflowers. This poetic text intertwines myths, fantasy (faeries and elves), music, nature and the anatomy of specific plants, especially flowers

Logos as Artefact
Word Become Flesh (Vol. 2)
Elizabeth Vels

The artist, Johannesburg. November 1993
Unique

Part of a dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Masters Diploma in Technology in the Department of Fine Art at the Technikon Witwatersrand November 1993.

Vels states: “In most of [my] sketches it will be noted that … the large leaves came from two potted Ficus Lyrata trees which caught the winter frost and shed their leaves, Having experimentally cast several leaves and noted the emphatic results, I decided to use these theatrical leaves to express the supernatural aspect of the promise to Abraham.”

Flora
Ann McGarrell (poems)

The Perishable Press, Mount Horeb, WI. 1990
Edition: #18/125

McGarell's content is a “recollection of four friends' excursion from Umbria through various French and Italian places, with digressive reflections upon matters of gourmandise, botany, beloved works of art and amourous play.”

Asleep in the Deep: The time before flowers
Claire Owen

Turtle Island Press, Philadelphia, PA. 1980-1981
Edition: #20/40

Asleep in the Deep, is a story about evolution and the emergence of flowering plants upon the earth. The book reflects Owen's interest in using events in the natural world as metaphors for the human experience.

Fig
Judith Rothchild

Verdigris, Octon, France. 2001
Edition: #4/48

Five round mezzotints of figs in various stages of plus a screen prints of fig leaves including a two-coloured one facing the colophon. Printed on Hahnemuhle paper with an extra signed mezzotint printed exclusively for this edition. D.H. Lawrence's provocative and erotic poem Fig first appeared in Birds, Beasts and Flowers in 1923. It achieved notoriety when it was used in a memorable scene in Ken Russell's film Women in Love. It is presented here with wonderful use of spacing for the text and luscious illustration. A sensual and beautiful piece of printing.

Goat Island Journal
Carol Schwartzott

Artist's Book, 1993

Goat Island is a natural one and a half mile island that is part of the American Falls. It is unique in that the natural aspects and wildlife have remained over the years, oblivious to the constant changing tourist attractions that seem to do their best at destroying the pure aesthetic of the Fall. I am an ardent walker and have for the past ten years walked on a daily basis the perimeter of the Island. Goat Island journal is based on my response to the changing of seasons. The original journal was created out of hand-made papers, their texture and closely related values keying into a more 'natural' interpretation of the subject matter. The xerox copy that you see before you is one of many, this particular one attempts to deal with more vibrant color, making the text that originally accompanied each frame not as necessary or integral to the sequence ...creating a more visual rather than literal translation.

The Perfect Garden
Carol Schwartzott

Lilliput Press, Niagra Falls, NY. 1996

This intricate book utilizes five movable reduction linocuts that create window vignettes of garden themes, each complemented by a short companion poem from such writers as Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson. The pictorial elements are comprised of three separate layers of reduction printed images, each layer having been cut away in specific areas to reveal the layer below.

Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley (original author)
Peter R. Jones (bookbinding)
Simon King (illustration)

Simon King Press, Cumbria, UK. 1992
Edition: One of 100 copies.
Unique binding housed in a Perspex and wooden slipcase with brass screws.
Bound between two pieces of cedarwood with velum ties sewn to a Perspex rod.

Paper from Plants
Peter and Donna Thomas

Peter & Donna Thomas, Santa Cruz, CA. 1999
Edition: #15/150 copies, of which 30 reserved for participants

A survey of America's hand papermakers with thirty, full-page sample sheets of papers made from local plants. The variety of plants and resultant papers offered some interesting occupational hazards in the making, and sometimes even in the transporting (as the DEA confiscated a shipment of Spanish Moss). Sample sheets are displayed alongside text sheets written by each papermaker that describes his or her choice of fiber and tells something of the plant and/or the process of making that particular paper. Illustrations of the plants by Donna Thomas adorn each text page. The samples have been stab sewn through an accordion folded gutter, uniquely developed for this book, that allows samples to expand and contract with changes in humidity without damaging neighboring sheets.

Paper Flowers
Rúna Thorkelsdóttir

Vossforlag, Amsterdam. 1996
Edition: #49/100

The bookwork Paper Flowers was made by Thorkelsdóttir over a period of two years on a Rotaprint machine at her studio in Amsterdam. Thorkelssdóttir works with materials found in nature or with ingredients strongly related to these. Iceland knows a long tradition of landscape painters and among them Johannes Sveinsson Kjarval is the most outstanding one. In combination with the dominant presence of nature in this country, Kjarval's work influences younger generations of artists who take frequently nature as a theme.

The Garden
Ilse Schreiber-Noll

Artists Book, n. p. 1997
Edition: #1/2

Schreiber-Noll states: “This small booklet is one of my early artist's books and marks the beginning of my ongoing focus on nature — a theme that has remained central to my work. My connection to the environment began in Germany, in my mother's garden. Surrounded by flowers, trees, and the quiet rhythms of the seasons, I developed a deep appreciation for the natural world. That early influence has stayed with me, surfacing repeatedly in my woodcuts, books, and paintings. I return to nature not only to celebrate its beauty and richness, but also to confront the damage it suffers at human hands. Through my work, I hope to spark reflection — to help viewers see what's often ignored: the fragile balance of the natural world and the urgent need to protect it.”

56 Tree Poems
Michael Snow

Imschoot, Gent, Belgium. 1999
Edition: One of 1000 copies

This evocative artist's book by Snow is a filmic collection of moody, dreamlike photos depicting the intricacies of tree branches, pictured from below. The book is designed with two covers and can be viewed in two directions.

16 dm2
Herman de Vries
an essay

Edition Lydia Megert, Bern. 1979
Edition: #39/50

The book shows the complete series of collages of 473 plants, collected in the meadow near Eschenau.The book is divided in 16 parts; on the front of the pages the 473 plants and grasses are reproduced in Xerox-copy on paper (29.7 × 21 cm). A number followed by two letters indicates the location of the specimens in each of the 16 squares. The book contains a folded map (heliography, opened 59.8 × 47.5 cm) showing a square of 40 x 40 cm divided in 16 squares horizontally numbered A, B, C, D and vertically W, X, Y, Z and inside each square the location of all plants are marked and numbered 1 etc.. The handwritten titlepage is followed by a handwritten colophon and by 2 pages with photographs (8.8 × 13 cm) of 16 dm² in the meadow with and without the plants

Temple of Flora
Jim Dine

Arion Press, San Francisco, CA. 1984
Edition: one of 175

Arion Press's Temple of Flora features twenty-eight large-scale, black-and-white drypoints and engravings by the American painter and printmaker Jim Dine, which were designed to complement a series of poems and botanical notes selected by the book's editors. It was inspired by the original Temple of Flora published in 1807 by the English physician and botanist Dr. Robert John Thornton (1765-1837). Thornton had paired oversized color plates of flowers, set in dramatic landscapes, with inspirational poetry and notes on flower lore and legend. For his illustrations, Dine used a number of unconventional cutting tools such as electric drills and grinders to achieve linear variation and subtle shifts in tone, ranging from soft grays to deep blacks.

Alien Invaders
Rosalind Cleaver

Artists Book, Johannesburg, RSA. 2008

The six landscape images in Alien Invaders appear as documents of selected South African locations representative of different floral biomes. The images were selected on the basis that, although they were photographed through a regular lens and from a standard viewpoint, they demonstrate no obvious signifiers which promote 'meaning' or 'message' and the photographs themselves are neither cropped nor manipulated. Each landscape is host to a particular printed shape and colour representative of a plant invader species.

The invaders represented are:
1. The water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes).
2. The red sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia).
3. Sisal (Agave sisalana).
4. Morning glory (Ipomoea indica and Ipomoea purpurea).
5. The moth catcher (Araujia sericifera).
6. Prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica).

Virginia Creeper
Parthenocissus Quinquefolio (L.) Planch.
Mary Taylor (book artist)
Charles Dickens (text)

Artists Book, Marshfield, MA. 2009
Edition: Unique

11 Akua monoprints on the front side and drawings made with woodless colored pencils around outlines made from rubbings of leaves on the reverse. Sheer ivory fabric with stitched decorative design sewn to the front cover and back page of the book. The monoprints were made with Virginia Creeper vines and are printed in shades of pink, russet and green going to white, almost transparent, images on the last two pages, all on yellow-rose grounds. The colors are repeated as original drawings on the verso.

The Island of Rota
Oliver Sacks (text)
Abelarao Morell (illustration)
Ted Muehling (design)

Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2010
Edition: #55/135

Ted Muehling's work encompasses most aspects of the book, including the typography and the layered structure. He designed the cycad leaf and sea-fan castings, the laser-cut image in two leaves of paper, the altered historical maps, and the cover and box.

Zones of Time, Sand and Rain
Nelleke Nix (book artist)
Phyllis Uitti-Maslin (photography)

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. 2000
Edition: #24/125

A metal-framed rainforest image on the center of front cover and includes 3-D lenses in a pocket for viewing two images in the book. It contains several stories and anecdotes about conservation efforts and a digital print of a Leatherback turtle laying her eggs, with the tale of a team of ecologists helping the injured turtle dig her nest.

Tulip
Susan Allix

Artists Book, London. 2008
Edition: Copy number F

The beauty and tragedy of the tulip's life are expressed through the form and composition of the book. To the painting was added a poem. Then elements of the painting were printed and given additional dimensions through lino-cut, monotype and blind printing.

Notional Field Notes
Katie Holton

Coracle, Tipperary, Ireland. 1999 Edition: #211/300

Notional looks and reads like a sketchbook. Printed in blue ink on thick gray pages, the notes, drawings, diagrams, instructions, lists, occasional poems, definitions, and musings are accompanied by yellow post-it notes pasted onto the page. They are graphic reminders of the focus-free exhilaration of the act of imagining for its own sake. Her works recall the childhood pleasures of mapping out imaginary territories, of dreaming up impossible schemes, of escaping, however briefly, into a world of delicious fantasy.

A Repeated Misunderstanding of Nature
Clifton Meador

Artists Book, n. p. 2012

A Repeated Misunderstanding of Nature is a set of five leporello books, each presenting a sequence of woodland images from Vinalhaven Island in Maine. The border of each image includes a text from a long, imaginary lecture by a professor who—even though he sounds convinced—is actually confused about how to understand nature: he drifts between thinking of nature as something to read and nature as an anthropomorphic presence. This work was inspired by Chinese literati landscape painting, a mode of art that used images of nature as a vocabulary rather than as representation of specific landscapes. For these literati, landscape was a metaphor for personal experience: for the confused professor in A Repeated Misunderstanding of Nature, these pictures of the autumnal forests of Maine become a text that defeats reading.

Read, Peep, Read
Eugene Hön

FADA, The University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg. 2014
Edition: Unique

The installation work consists of the following:
- A ballpoint-pen drawing of an Iris, which is framed with a venetian blind to protect the ink medium from sunlight.
- a book consisting of the visual label cut into strips, held together with two strings, with a brown spine with the title and author's name and “702.81HON” mimicking the Library of Congress call number. This is held upright between two perspex bookends.
- An digitally printed concertina fold booklet in archival inks in which the original Iris flower morphs into kaleidoscopic new patterns.

Day Dream
(Twelve verses from)
Susan Allix (book artist)
Alfred (Lord) Tennyson (poem)

Susan Allix, London. 1995
Edition: #4/17

Tennyson's poem The Sleeping Beauty with its themes of dream, inspiration and escape, was published first in 1830 before he expanded it after the death of Arthur Hallam, renaming it The Day Dream. Susan Allix selected all of 'The Sleeping Palace' section of the poem and single stanzas from the sections 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'The Arrival' and 'The Departure' and two from 'The Revival'.

Cork Book
Unknown

No publisher

This is a book showing the unusual material of cork for both the pages and cover.

In Mexico
Helen Douglas (book artist)
Edward James (text)

Weproductions, Deuchar Mill, Yarrow. 2014

This concertina opens in vibrant colour to reveal in progressive spreads of two, four and six pages a rich sensory exploration of Edward James' surreal jungle garden Las Posaz, in Mexico. Lush vegetation intertwines with the constructed buildings and staircases of James' imagination and with Douglas' own. … With the unfolding pages, from ground to tree tops, the viewer can ascend with the staircases and flit with the butterflies of the garden, suspending gravity and disbelief, venturing through gates and windows to boughs and fern vaults in the sky. And in so doing experience, within the small intimacy of book, something of the unfolding immensity of the garden and its timeless fusion of earth and paradise, real and surreal.

Halleria lucida
from University of Johannesburg Print Portfolio
A Special Gift Edition in Honour of Professor Ihron Rensburg, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, 2005 - 2017
Rosalind Cleaver (featured artist)
[and ten others]
Nkosinathi Ndladla (papermaker)
Tree fuschia / Umbinza

University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg. 2017
Etching, aquatint and collage on Fabriano Rosaspina paper
Edition: #17/20

Untitled
from University of Johannesburg Print Portfolio
A Special Gift Edition in Honour of Professor Ihron Rensburg, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, 2005 - 2017
Inge-Lore Hyson (featured artist)
[and ten others]
Nkosinathi Ndladla (papermaker)

University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg. 2017
Hand-made cotton and hemp paper with encased plant forms
Edition: #17/20

Paper Botanists
Cultivators of Artifice
Claudia Cohen
Barbara Hodgson

Byzantium Press, Canada. 2021
Edition: #25/30

The extended subtitle reads: or Botany Depicted by the Various Arts of Drawing, Painting, Nature Printing, Wood- & Linocutting, Etching, Engraving, Lithography, Sun Printing, Photography, Marbling, Stencilling, Punching, Papercutting, & etc. Vamp & Tramp description: Paper Botanists explores the connections between paper and botanical arts. Some illustrations are culled from incomplete volumes of botanical texts over the last 350 years, and those specially created by the authors for this book.

The Cycad Collection
Douglas Goode (illustrator)
John Comrie-Greig (text)
Brett Hendey (preface)
P. Vorster (introduction)
Malcolm Christian (printer)
Peter Carstens (bookbinder)

Volume 1 Natal Province
The Caversham Press, Balgowan, RSA.1996
Edition: #20/100

The Cycad Collection was envisaged as the first of a number of botanical volumes. This single volume is possibly one of the rarest books on the subject in the form of a Florilegium. It took a total of five years to comp lete as each of the completed lithographic images is hand-coloured. Due to the labour-intensive process, the full edition has yet to be conceptualised and will probably never be realised.

The Arctic Plants of New York City
James Walsh (text)
Daniel E. Kelm (bookbinder)

Granary Books, New York. 2015
Edition: Binder's copy/40

“This book was sparked by a simple thought—I wonder if there are any plants that grow in both the Arctic and New York City? There are quite a few, as it turns out, and I embarked on a project of discovering the Arctic by staying close to home and paying particular attention to the libraries and land around me, searching for whatever Arctic plants I could find here.”

The Arctic Plants of New York City combines personal letters, poetry, prose essay, scholarly research, botanical exploration, and artistic investigation. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of two-page spreads that focus on a single plant, such as Common Mugwort, with a mounted botanical specimen of that plant surrounded by texts drawn from earlier writers on botany and set in verse, creating a field of word-objects interacting with plant-objects. The letters that open the book lead into a prose essay that touches on the souls of plants, their use in medicine and as spurs to mental travel, their transience, their migrations, their meaning. The book concludes with a reproduction of the index from Nicholas Polunin's Circumpolar Arctic Flora (1959), in which the author has marked in red pen the 88 Arctic plants that occur in New York City.

Twenty-six Leaves of one Tree
Leda Black

Palabra Press, n. p. 1999
Edition: #13/50

The artist has made careful outline drawings of 26 unique leaves from a Quercus Rubra tree, one of 450 species of Oak. Printed on tracing paper, the line drawings are visible through the pages.

Ars Botanica
A Collection of Poems
Enid Mark

ELM Press, The, Wallingford, PA. 2004
Edition: AP/40

This is a 64-page compilation of poems and images is inspired by the long tradition of herbariums and botanical books, especially those published in Europe from the 17th Century onward. The poems, with one exception, were written specifically for Ars Botanica with the images created in response to them. Timothy P. Sheesley's hand-pulled lithographs are printed on both translucent sheets and Japanese paper providing a rich visual dialogue between images and texts.

The Architecture of Trees
Franca Stagi (author)
Cesare Leonardi (author)
Natalie Danford (translation)
Giulio Orsini (introduction)
Andrea Cavani (introduction)
Laura Conti (foreword)

Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 2019
ISBN: 9781616898069

The Architecture of Trees is considered a “legendary and unsurpassed botanical masterwork.” The volume features more than 400 quill-pen illustrations of 211 tree species, drawn to a scale of 1:100, with and without foliage, complete with tables of seasonal color variations and projections of shadows cast during the hours of daylight and season by season. First published in 1982, this English-language edition took more than twenty years to complete.