GAIA Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities


THE MACRO AND MICROSCOPIC VISUAL ARTS IN BOTANICAL SCIENCES: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE


Rafael De Almeida
Associate Professor and Curator of the C.E. Moss Herbarium, Life Sciences Museum, School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

I remember, early in my academic career, standing at the edge of a rainforest slope as the afternoon cooled and the light was slowly replaced by darkness. A colleague - an artist by training - stood beside me with a digital hand camera, trying to capture the last of the sun's rays over the canopy of the edge of the forest. She was translating the plant community into blurs and negative space, while I was mentally translating all the plant specimens we had collected that day into Latin names. In that moment, the difference between our modes of attention seemed less binary and more like two complementary grammars for the same subject. Over time in my work - researching plant systematics and supervising postgraduate students - I have come to see the relationship between visual arts and botanical science as not incidental but foundational: the ways in which we look, depict, archive and lecture about plants, shape what we know about them and how we act on that knowledge.

This essay explores that interface: the practical and philosophical entanglement of artistic practice and botanical science in the South African context; the pedagogical opportunities; the collaborative practices that can renew both disciplines, and the future possibilities that new technologies and plural ways of knowing open. I write as someone who moves between continents (I'm originally from Brazil), countries, laboratories, herbarium stacks, and botanical gardens. I lecture on plant systematics and conservation, and I regularly supervise students who work with botanical artists and photographers. I do not claim to be an artist nor to speak for indigenous or traditional knowledge holders, instead, I seek to sketch a considered account of how visual arts can lend me tools to better depict botanical terms, mutually informing, restraining and liberating one another.

Visual arts as a scientific tool

Botanical science has always been visual, with early accounts of taxonomic practice heavily depending on precise observation of morphological characters. Floras, identification keys, watercolours, line drawings, and herbarium sheets are visual archives. Historically, botanical illustration was not decorative, but rather a practical tool (pg.90). A well-executed plate distilled years of observation of botanical naturalists of the 18th to 19th centuries into a readable, replicable depiction: diagnostic views, dissection of floral parts, scales, and magnified details in an age when stereomicroscopes were barely functional. These plates acted as instruments of knowledge transfer across time and place, enabling botanists in one place and time to test their identifications against specimens they could not themselves examine.

In contemporary practice, the visual arts remain a core competency in botany. When I teach students how to prepare specimens or write descriptions, I insist they learn to see - carefully, slowly, with an eye for variation and scale - by taking digital photographs, drawing, and encouraging different kinds of looking through their scientific lenses. When you draw or photograph something, you must attend to its proportion, to negative space, to the interplay of plant structure and texture. This slow attention trains the eye to notice characters that descriptive text may not correctly recognise or illuminate.

Beside the benefits gained from the discipline of drawing, digital photography has transformed botanical documentation and public engagement. Photos can be indiscriminate, capturing everything and nothing at once when no special attention is given to particular structures. Photographs aimed at scientific illustration, by contrast, remove the irrelevant and highlight the diagnostic with a black background, contrasting all the colours and light from different plant structures (pg.85). This contemporary mode of digital imaging technology facilitates the creation of compelling and focused botanical plates for those who, like me, are not gifted in the art of drawing.

Botanical art as practice, pedagogy and public engagement

Across academia, art and science collaborations take many forms. Botanical artists who produce commissioned plates or works for exhibitions are practitioners in a lineage that includes both scientific precision and aesthetic refinement. Their work translates scientific knowledge into forms accessible to a broader public, while often contributing back to science through careful observation. For instance, a botanical artist's rendering of a threatened shrub might reveal overlooked morphological variability, prompting a taxonomic reappraisal. Conversely, an artist's exhibition can help establish public support for conservation initiatives where scientific prose alone might not.

In the classroom, integrating visual arts into curricula has pedagogical advantages. I have run modules where students alternate between lab work and Photoshop practice: one week measuring stomatal density and extracting DNA, the next week manually cropping botanical photos retrieved from iNaturalist and painting the background black. These are not mere aesthetic exercises or extras, but formative assessments of observational acuity and reflective practices that surface the practical dimensions of botanical digital work. Students who are reluctant to write find other entry points for synthesising literature and field observations through visual essays, herbarium specimens, and interpretive maps. This approach expands the habits of mind we value in scientific training - creativity, attention, listening to nonverbal evidence - and, crucially, it broadens the audience for our work.

Public engagement is another area where art's capacity to translate complexity into resonance is indispensable. Botanical prints in a community hall, a series of photographs in a municipal library, or an installation in a botanical garden can become nodes where science meets lived experience. South Africa's botanical gardens and life sciences museums, for example, function as sites of scientific research, conservation and public learning. They are also cultural spaces where art exhibits help reframe botanical subjects, situating plants within histories of use, colonial collection, and indigenous knowledge.

The historical entanglement: colonial collecting, herbaria and representation

Any honest account of the visual and botanical must confront a difficult history. Botanical science in southern Africa is inseparable from colonial legacies. Early botanical plates, herbarium sheets and floras were produced within networks of empires. Plants were catalogued, named, and transported to European centres of learning. Visual representations - plates, pressed specimens, and even landscape paintings - participated in projects of classification that often erased or marginalised indigenous knowledges and uses.

As a professor working in this space, I stress to students that decontextualised objects can conceal power. A specimen label that lists collector and date, but not local name or use, offers a truncated story. Imagery - especially museum and herbarium displays that foreground European collectors or aestheticise exotic flora - can reproduce colonial narratives. Engaging artists in critical projects can help unpack these legacies: collaborative exhibitions, for instance, that juxtapose historical plates with contemporary responses from local communities, or that commission artworks reflecting vernacular plant knowledge and uses, can provoke a dialogue about whose knowledge is visible and why.

Moreover, repair is possible. Digitisation projects are expanding access to herbaria and making it easier to share specimens with communities of origin. Artist-scientist partnerships can foreground local names, uses, and cultural meanings within displays and teaching materials. When we design such projects, ethical practice demands consultation, acknowledgement, and - where appropriate - restitution of knowledge or material. Visual culture is both a site of past harm and a resource for more inclusive representation.

Collaboration in practice: studios, labs and field camps

Collaboration between artists and botanists is not automatic but requires negotiation of methods and timelines. In my experience, fruitful projects are those in which roles are clarified but boundaries are porous. Artists need access to specimens, lab materials or field sites, while botanists need time to engage with iterative creative processes that may not fit grant timelines. Successful collaborations attend to these structural asymmetries from the outset: shared grants that budget for studio time and community fees, joint planning of exhibitions and research outputs, and co-authored publications or catalogues that recognise contribution beyond token acknowledgements.

In research settings, collaborations can also be formalised in specimen-driven projects - monographs that include plates by botanical artists, conservation assessments illustrated with narrative maps, or public installations that translate distribution data into sculptural forms. These outputs expand the impact of botanical work beyond the academy and make species' stories legible to diverse publics.

Community practice and citizen science

One of the most heartening developments in recent years is the energising of community-based botanical practice through visual arts. Community gardens, mural projects, participatory mapping and local exhibitions can connect people to plant conservation in ways that are immediate and embodied (see Ruth Sacks's Kind pg.117). For example, collaborative mural projects that depict locally significant plants, painted with schoolchildren and elders, can function as public herbaria: they are places where plant names, uses, and stories circulate. These projects do not replace scientific inventories, but they create cultural scaffolding for conservation, making it easier for local people to advocate for habitat protection.

Citizen science platforms benefit from artistic thinking, too. A well-designed app interface that uses visual cues and pedagogical illustrations can boost data quality by guiding observers on how to take useful photos and record contextual metadata. Artists and designers are, therefore, vital partners in building tools that translate scientific rigour into accessible practices.

Conservation, policy and the aesthetics of value

Plants are not only objects of scientific curiosity; they have value - ecological, cultural, and economic. How societies see plants shapes policy. Visual arts contribute to shaping public perceptions of what is valuable in a landscape. Charismatic trees turned into icons via photography, painting or public sculpture often command more protection than less photogenic but ecologically crucial shrubs or grasses. This aesthetic bias has implications for conservation priorities.

As a botanist concerned with conservation, I see an imperative to collaborate with artists to reframe the aesthetic register of conservation. Artistic projects can render the subtle drama of grassland processes, the intimate lives of cryptic succulents, or the seasonal brilliance of fire-dependent floras. By shifting what publics find beautiful, we can expand the political constituency for threatened ecosystems. Conversely, we must be careful that aestheticisation does not commodify landscapes in ways that exclude local users or trigger environmentally harmful tourism.

Concluding reflections

The intersection of visual arts and botanical science is not an optional aesthetic flourish but a space where knowledge is produced, contested and communicated. My years supervising students, curating botanical collections and negotiating collaborative grants have convinced me that looking well - learning to see with both the precise eye of the scientist and the attentive curiosity of the artist - is a skill that transforms practice. It changes not only how we describe a plant but how we decide what to protect, how to teach, and how to share the urgency of biodiversity loss with broader publics.

South Africa, with its extraordinary plant diversity and complex histories of land, language and labour, is a fertile laboratory for these collaborations. Here, botanical images carry layered meanings: scientific, cultural, historical and political. If we are to meet the twin crises of biodiversity loss and social inequity, we must harness the modes of seeing that art fosters and the methods of rigour that science demands. The work is messy, sometimes uncomfortable, and requires sustained commitment to ethical partnership. But in the overlapping practices of drawing, describing, curating and listening, there is a generative space - a place where new kinds of knowledge and new constituencies for conservation can be cultivated.

So, I return, in thought, to that declining light on a rainforest slope. The digital hand camera, the plate, the herbarium label, the watercolour and the molecular sequence: each is partial, each a tool. Together they form an ecology of practice. If we make room for each other - artists learning scientific patience; scientists learning artistic attention - we gain not only more complete knowledge of plants but richer ways of relating to the living world that sustains us.


© Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts (JGCBA). All rights reserved.