A respected botanist and botanical artist, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) made contributions to the field of botany that continue to benefit us to this day. His life story, his contributions to botany and his illustrations are presented in Joseph Hooker: Botanical Trailblazer, a new book by science writer Pat Griggs.
Released in the US just this week, Griggs’ book is based on the exhibition about Joseph Hooker now on view at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Joseph Hooker lived to be 94 years old. During his lifetime he identified over 12,000 species of plants, had a 40-year friendship with Charles Darwin, collected plants in the western US with botanist Asa Gray, worked closely with botanical artist Walter Hood Fitch, received many awards for his work, and was a family man with 9 children.
When Joseph was born, his father Sir William Hooker, the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was struggling to turn his passion for plants into a financially viable profession at a time when the study of plants was not taken seriously and the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and geology were more highly regarded. According to Griggs, William Hooker used to collect fees from his students as they entered his classroom. Because teaching a “lowly” (Griggs, 2011) subject such as botany did not ensure financial stability, William supplemented his income with writing articles and books for gardeners. A young Joseph Hooker used to sit in on his father’s lectures and tag along on field trips. All he wanted to do with his life was to study plants. However, recognizing that professionals in the other sciences did not think much of botany, Joseph became a doctor and used this title (and his father’s contacts) to secure a place on an expedition to the Antarctic. Being only a rookie assistant surgeon at the time, Hooker asked to be appointed as the ship’s botanist. The expedition commander granted Hooker this “meaningless title” (Griggs, 2011) and this set in motion the first of many adventures for the young enthusiastic botanist.
Upon opening Griggs’ book, you are struck immediately with one undeniable fact, and this is the critical role drawing has played in our understanding of plants and nature. The value of visual note taking is reinforced on almost every page of this 64-page book. Griggs does a wonderful job presenting Hookers’ pencil sketches alongside his watercolor paintings and of presenting the paintings by Walter Hood Fitch. Fitch was a botanical artist and lithographer who was the illustrator for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. The paintings and lithographs Fitch created for Hooker were based on Hooker’s field drawings. Excerpts from Joseph Hooker’s field journal and personal letters are also included in the book and they offer a brief glimpse at the extensive notes and abundant illustrations he must have created during his lifetime.
Hooker’s plant studies, with their pencil sketches and watercolor accents, are irresistible. The dissected plant parts he includes in his studies make them even more exciting and will cause you to linger over his drawings to think about how each plant is assembled. The off-color and aged grounds upon which the sketches are drawn will cause you to wonder about the stories Hooker could tell if he were alive today. Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder about this for too long because Griggs treats readers to a list of references that includes links to websites where readers can view digitized copies of Hooker’s books and field notes dating from 1849-1878.
In addition to the historical text and botanical images in Joseph Hooker: Botanical Trailblazer, Griggs provides an informative timeline of significant events in Joseph Hooker’s life, as well as information about Kew’s Economic Botany Collection that was founded by Sir William Hooker. This collection is composed of 85,000 items, many collected by Joseph during his plant collecting trips.
Joseph Hooker: Botanical Trailblazer is recommended for anyone with an interest in plants, plant exploration, or natural history art. It is written for a general audience and is a wonderful introduction to the history of botany.
Joseph Hooker: Botanical Trailblazer is available at ArtPlantae Books. ($17)
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