NON- FICTION

The Botanical Wall Chart: Art from the Golden Age of Science Discovery by ANNA LAURENT

LONG BEFORE photography, scientists relied on drawings and paintings of specimens for their study. This led to an amazing convergence of art and science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientific – and specially botanical – illustrations and wall charts are enjoying a well-deserved resurgence in interest as both objet d’art and historical records. Writer and photographer Anna Laurent encapsulates this Renaissance-like convergence with a varied career that began studying biological anthropology and literature at Harvard, before becoming, first, a documentary filmmaker and then a botanist in Southern California. Since 2010 she has been a writer and producer for an ongoing documentary called The Iraqi Seed Project, about heirloom species and economic botany in the Fertile Crescent . This book is a tribute to her passion.