​Helen M. Gilkey Papers, 1907-1974
These papers were generated and collected by Helen Gilkey, professor of botany and curator of the Herbarium at Oregon Agricultural College until her retirement in 1951. Gilkey's botanical drawings and plant identifications made her a well-known expert in the field. The papers include scientific illustrations, many drawn by Gilkey, and her thesis Oregon Mushrooms with hand-drawn and colored illustrations. More about Gilkey can be found in the Oregon State University Memorabilia Collection, Box-Folder 78.16: Gilkey, Helen, 1930-2004 and Box-Folder 180.23: Gilkey, Helen (oversize), 1930-2004.

Marian Field Collection, 1936-1982
The Marian Field Collection consists primarily of botanical drawings by Field for a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. Most were drawn as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project between 1936 and 1941 for Frank Sipe, a botanist at the University of Oregon who had hoped to publish a book using the drawings.

Bonnie B. Hall Botanical Prints, 1989-2003
Bonnie B. Hall Botanical Prints consist of serigraphic screen prints created by Bonnie Hall, a scientific illustrator and artist.  Hall was well known, particularly for her botanical prints and was a scientific illustrator for the Department of Entomology at Oregon State University from 1963 -1993.  

Oliver Matthews Collection, 1905-2013*
The Matthews Collection consists of scrapbooks and trip logs pertaining to Oregon trees, logging methods, and wood products. The scrapbooks, arranged by species or other subject, include correspondence, clippings, photographs, and postcards. The logs contain day-by-day and mile-by-mile information on trips taken by Matthews in his search for botanical specimens, wood samples, and rare or large trees. The logs include maps, photographs, correspondence, trip narratives, receipts., and botanical drawings.

Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogs Collection
The Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogues Collection consists of more than 2200 flower and seed catalogues produced by nurseries and seed companies in the United States, Great Britain, Europe and Asia from the mid-19th century through the 20th century. They are a wealth of botanical illustration through these centuries.

Kareen Peiffer Laboratory Notes, 1930-1931
The Kareen Peiffer Laboratory Notes consist of laboratory notes and drawings made by Peiffer in botany and zoology courses at Oregon State College. Peiffer graduated from Oregon State in 1934 with a degree in education.

Fritz Marti Papers, 1909-2009*
Fritz Marti (1894-1991), was a Swiss-born philosophy professor highly regarded as an expert on post-Kantian idealism. His student gymnasium notebooks contain illustrations for his botany studies (Series 2).

The history of botany and horticulture is also the history of botanical illustration. Botanical illustrations are important representations of a specimen - illustrators have to be naturalistic, detailed, scientifically accurate, and skilled at first-hand observation. They also have to, depending on the publication, show the context of the plant, how it was found. They preserve data, present information, and are in a form to disseminate that information - as works of science, they are also works of art.

Keywords: botan* illus*, botan* woodcut, botan* engrav*, botan* lithographs, flora, botanical illustrations

We are privileged to steward some truly fine examples of this art in the SCARC rare book collections. Spectacular woodcuts in early herbals such as Dodoens History of Plants, Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, Gerard’s Herbal, and Fernandez's Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae, demonstrate the importance of accuracy in early modern plant identification.

Important botanical engravings in the 17th and 18th centuries appear in titles such as Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants, and John Rea's Flora seu, De florum cultura, or, A complete florilege.

SCARC's early 19th century botanical illustration holdings are particularly strong, with vivid hand-colored engravings in Curtis' Botanical Magazine, Edwards' Botanical Register, and in early journals such as the Proceedings of the Linnean Society and Transactions of the Horticultural Society.

Other 19th century gems include James Sowerby's English Botany and Colored figures of English mushrooms, as well as the breathtaking hand-colored engravings Alymer Lambert's monumental A Description of the Genus Pinus, often called the most beautiful botanical book ever printed.

Examples of nature printing and specimen mounting include Nature-printed British ferns, Hough's American Woods, and Victorian algae mounted specimen collections.

Other notable illustrative works include those that focus on the botany of specific regions, such as Linneaus' Flora Lapponica or Frye's Northwest Flora.

Oregon Digital

Results (limited to OSU) for botanical illustrations

The OSU Herbarium Type Specimens Collection

The Oregon State University Herbarium is an essential resource for biodiversity research in the region. With over 400,000 specimens, it maintains the world's largest collection of Oregon plant and fungal specimens. We have imaged the 2000 type specimens in our collection, and digitized the original descriptions (known as protologues) of the 1350 plant taxa represented by these specimens. The type collection is a pressed herbarium specimen upon which the original description was based and thus has central importance in the science of plant taxonomy.

Scholars Archive

Results for botanical illustrations

Including student-produced reports, theses, and presentations, along with faculty scholarship.