Looking for uncommon gifts for the science-lover and nature-ecstatic in your life (or in your soul)? Here are some wearable, washable, wallable, giftable wonders featuring artwork restored from centuries-old natural history, botany, and astronomy books, with proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
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The adorable doodles Darwin’s kids left all over his manuscript of On the Origin of Species, published on this day in 1859 .
The forgotten poet Joseph Pintauro, born on this day in 1930, made some uncommonly wonderful children’s books for grownups, long and lamentably out of print. Here is what survives of them.
In honor of the November 2021 partial lunar eclipse – the longest in 500 years – French artist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s stunning 19th-century astronomical drawings of eclipses, planets, comets, meteor showers, and other wonders of the universe.
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O’Keeffe, born on this day in 1887, on the art of seeing.
A bittersweet celebration of the beauty and fragility of Earth’s most delicate ecosystem in artist Rogan Brown’s paper sculptures of bleached coral – organisms that thrived for 500 million years, until we came along and proceeded to decimate them in the mere century since we first gasped at their beauty in our first vibrantly illustrated encyclopedia of their world.
“These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based ‘flying ointment’ that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the 'broomstick’ by which these women were said to travel.”
Michael Pollan on the radical history of gardening and the scandalous, subversive botanical origin of the witch’s broomstick.
One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.
Sylvia Plath would have been 89 today. The (depressed) young poet’s stirring letter to her (depressed) mother about living with the darkness – a poignant lens on nature and nurture, heredity and mental health, and what makes us who we are.
Chlorophyll evolved more than a billion years, was discovered 200 years ago, yet remains a mystery. Its fascinating science explains why, when autumn leaves change, nature’s true colors are actually revealed – colors that include true-blue bananas.
Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.
Alain de Botton on the importance of breakdowns.
“These objects are, it is true, among the humblest of creatures that are endowed with organic life… Here we catch the first kindling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame in the Aristotles, the Newtons, and the Miltons of our heaven-gazing race.”
Philip Henry Gosse’s stunning 19th-century illustrations of and meditations on coastal creatures and the interleaving of life.
Cutting boards with centuries-old astronomical, botanical, and natural history art. Because why not. Proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Elizabeth Blackwell is 29. The year is 1736. Her husband is in debtor’s prison, she has a small child to feed, and so she turns desperation into inspiration, she learns botany, and she paints a pioneering encyclopedia of medicinal plants – including (for International Coffee Day today) coffee, as well as the tomato, then known as “love apple.” See them all here.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
The Blue Horses of Our Destiny – artist Franz Marc, the wisdom of animals, and the fight of beauty against brutality, with a side of Mary Oliver.
Luscious 19th-century French botanical illustrations of some of the most vibrant and unusual plants of the Americas and the Caribbean, including the surprising natural state of familiar foods like cashews, cacao, and yams.