Flora, Fauna, Fungi: Books by Women Naturalists

Five illustrated volumes on loan from local libraries illuminate women’s significant roles in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and in scientific illustration from the late 1600s through the 1800s. Entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian’s extraordinary Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, published in 1705, contains her meticulous descriptions and illustrations of South American insects produced from observing each in its natural habitat. The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala, a mammoth volume published between 1837 and 1843, features striking, life-size images of orchids reproduced from watercolors by botanical illustrators Sarah Ann Drake and Augusta Innes Baker Withers. Amateur ornithologist Genevieve Estelle Jones and her friend Eliza Jane Shulze learned the lithography process to begin Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. After Jones’s untimely death, her mother Virginia Jones completed the illustrations for publication in 1886. Flora, Fauna, Fungi: Books by Women Naturalists explores how these remarkable women and others created and shared scientific knowledge through art.