Flowers & Trees

Before color photography, if you wanted a picture of a flower that looked like the flower, someone had to paint it. That simple fact explains most of what is in this collection.

Botanical illustration was a serious trade for centuries. Artists worked from living specimens and drew every stamen and leaf vein, because the pictures were meant to identify plants, not decorate walls. In the 1800s the seed and nursery business took up the same skills for a new purpose. Seed companies printed catalogs and packets in bright chromolithography, and a good catalog cover could sell more seed than any description.

Trees had their own campaign. J. Sterling Morton, a Nebraska newspaperman, pushed for a day of tree planting on the bare prairie, and the first Arbor Day was held there in 1872. The idea spread to schools across the country, and photographs of children planting saplings in schoolyards turn up for decades afterward. In 1912 the city of Tokyo gave Washington the cherry trees that still bloom around the Tidal Basin.

The photographs in this collection lean toward trees, and there is a practical reason. Early cameras needed long exposures, and a flower moves in the slightest breeze. A 300-year-old oak does not. So the 19th-century camera found its way to giant redwoods, village elms, orchards in bloom and the formal gardens of large estates, while flowers stayed mostly in the hands of printmakers.

Look at the people standing next to the big trees. They are almost never there by accident. Photographers placed them as a scale bar, and the habit lasted long after anyone needed it. Many of the elms and chestnuts in these pictures are gone now, taken by Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, which makes an ordinary shaded street from 1900 a record of something that has disappeared.