18th and 19th Century Botanicals
A garden can be a "private space," a plot of ground, commonly adjacent to a home planted with delightful flowers, bushes, and ornamental plants (there is of course also the garden which is largely planted in vegetables, fruits, and herbs destined for the family dinner table). A "public space" within a town or city, frequently referred to as a garden or park, will include most of these, but also a wide variety of pleasing grasses, shrubs, and trees, designed for all to enjoy.
Our modern word garden seems to have originated in Germany between 1300 and 1500. At first spelled "gartin," we are all familiar with the word Kindergarten, which was borrowed from the German. But before the word entered the our modern lexicon it first journeyed through Old French "jardin" and Old North French "gardin" coming finally into English as "garden."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hard to imagine distant cobwebbed centuries,
to comprehend a world absent technology.
Before the appearance of the Phylum, "Camera,"
the human desire to record, preserve, existed.
What today we photograph in an instant, was once
painstakingly drawn, colored, and painted by hand.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, enthralled
botanists captured the verdant natural world.
Books and magazines were liberally sprinkled
with the reverential phrase, "the Glories of Nature."
Botanical gardens signified the taste, wealth,
the cultural sophistication of a great city.
Ferns, fronds, pine cones, seeds, herbs, exotic grasses,
flowering plants, and trees of every description.
Daffodils, iris, tiger lilies, and violets -
others, whose beauty I know, if not their names.
- Marble and Stone - A Polish Sculptor - Edmund Ast
Edmund Ast, was born and raised in Poland, and obtained a university degree in art, specializing in sculpture and design. This was quite unusual for a young men in Poland in the 1920's. He was extremely talented and worked on many diverse designs in - Texas Painter Memorializes America's Fallen Soldiers
A retired sign painter in Texas, Ken Pridgeon, is single-handedly memorializing all the men and women from Texas who have died on active military duty in America's recent wars and conflicts in the Middle East. They and he deserve to be remembered. - Abstract and Representational Paintings - Wanda Ast,...
A selection of oil paintings completed in the 1960's and 1970's by a Polish-American artist who survived the Nazi, and then the Soviet, invasions of Poland during World War II, and who subsequently emigrated to America with her husband and four child
gardens
- Fiddlehead Ferns, Fiddlehead Ferns
Some see Nature's bounty, beauty, elegance, while others see Nature - Nature, Birds, Art Quilts ~~ Karin Franzen
Quilting was a practical craft - a way to use worn out clothing, scrap materials to make warm, cozy bed covers. Over time the craft evolved. Today quilting can best be described as FINE ART. - World of Nature ~~ Divine Design
Nature is a prolific mother; she produces abundance almost everywhere. We only have to look at topography, flora, and fauna to recognize and rejoice in her creative and generative capacities.
Botanical Illustrations and Gardening
