Following in the Bartrams' Footsteps

"The Legacy of the Bartrams" with Carol Woodin, ASBA(American Society of Botanical Art)   Exhibitions Director,    A very well presented lecture.

The first exhibition to be presented in the newly moved Girtin Hall to the site of the Botanical Garden and very well received to find these works of art, in a work of art.   143 artists submitted works, ascribed to selected works by Bartram, which they were to reinterpret, and 43 were chosen.  The show has been at Bartrams Garden in Philadelphia, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and in Florida,among its venues.

The show and the lecture brought back many memories of the happy hours I spent in Bartram's garden and of the lecture I presented there for the anniversary celebration and how Bartram led me to following Linnaeus in Sweden and learning how many specimens from North America are in the Kew Gardens, due to the correspondence. .

Mention was made of Elizabeth Gilbert's recent book, THE SIGNATURE  OF ALL THINGS, a historical fiction, she situates  in Woodlands, in Philadelphia, a house I had known well as I had acted as a consultant to the house museums under the administration of the Philadelphia Art Museum.  EG says this the first book that required extensive research, which corresponded to my own research in China, of the "hunters" who carried tea specimens back to America in the accounts of their histories.  EG chooses one of these explorers  as her "anti-hero" who decides to be the one who contracts the exchange of plants and becomes very wealthy, bearing a child, who loves to study plants in particular mosses.



Carol Woodin, ASBA Exhibitions Director 


The Mosses 


Julia Morgan's Lingate Hall on the grounds
of the Botanical Gardens, UCB 
.  .

The Franklinia 


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