Happy Orchid Wednesday!

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For this Orchid Wednesday, I wanted to feature the stunning hand-colored illustrations from an original art collection held in the Peter H. Raven Library of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The Collection d’Orchidées (19th C.) contains 97 beautifully illustrated plates by an unknown artist. Each plate has handwritten descriptions written in German on the back, along with handwritten taxonomy on the front.

Because the collection is an original, the artist made deliberate choices regarding the paper on which the orchids were illustrated. The use of grey and brown paper makes the orchids’ colors pop off the screen in these digitized images, particularly the white.

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Happy Wingsday!

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These beautiful butterflies are from Plate 54 in Histoire Naturelle des Lépidoptères Exotiques (1835) by Pierre-Hippolyte Lucas (17 January 1814 – 5 July 1899). Lucas was a French entomologist, who worked at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.

Histoire Naturelle des Lépidoptères Exotiques was a serial publication in 20 parts that contains 80 hand-colored plates with descriptions and illustrations of non-European butterflies, including many species from South America, Australia, or Asia.

Plate 54 showcases 3 species of butterflies that are likely to be known currently as:

  1. Scarce Bamboo Page, Philaethria dido
  2. Lacewing butterfly, Cethosia lamarckii
  3. Lacewing butterfly, Cethosia leschenaultii

View more beautiful plates from this work in Biodiversity Heritage Library‘s Flickr album. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives digitized this work for BHL and added it to their Flickr collection.

Happy Squirrel Appreciation Day!

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SQUIRREL! Endlessly entertaining and adored by many, these natural acrobats live in both trees and the ground. From their complex underground burrows to their flights through the air with the greatest of ease, these mammals are certainly worth appreciating.

Squirrels are part of the taxonomic family Sciuridae, a name derived from the Greek “skiouros” which means “shadow tail”, the most prominent feature of these small, delightful rodents. The squirrel family also includes chipmunks, marmots, and prairie dogs.

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