Susan Morrison on a show of flower power
A project at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens to create a florilegium – a collection of botanical art to mirror its collection of plants – has proved a blooming success, writes Susan Mansfield
The closure of Inverleith House in 2016, after a long and illustrious history as a space for modern and contemporary art, sent shockwaves through the art world. The Georgian House, in the midst of Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens ( RBGE) has hosted occasional exhibitions since, mainly of art with botanical themes, but its future as a gallery seemed far from secure.
An announcement in May heralded its transformation into Climate House, with a three- year programme of art on ecological and botanical themes, a major award from the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and a partnership with the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park.
This year’s programme, the first brought together by Emma Nicolson, who came to the gardens as head of creative programmes 18 months ago from Skye’s Atlas Arts, aimed to celebrate the RBGE’S 350th anniversary. The planned exhibitions and activities were badly disrupted by the pandemic, and this show, which was intended as the finale, now looks more like a beginning than an end.
RBGE, unlike most botanical gardens, does not have a Florilegium - a collection of botanical art to mirror its collection of plants. This show takes the first steps towards making one, but with a bold new spin on the idea: it will include both botanical art and commissioned works by contemporary artists.
Artists from all over the world responded to an open call for botanical paintings illustrating plants in the RBGE glass houses, and other scientifically important plants in the collection. With travel restricted due to the pandemic, the artists were unable to work in situ, but some - in Brazil, India and the Far East - were able to draw the plants concerned in their native habitat.
Interestingly, botanical illustration still has an important role to play in the study of plants, and the show also includes the work of the botanical painters who work at the gardens, including a tribute to artist and teacher Lizzie Sanders, who died in the summer. Taken together, they illustrate a range of approaches to botanical art: some are studies of a single specimen, others bring in seed pods and reproductive parts, the environment and its pollinators.
The brief life cycle of a flower is a potent metaphor both for mortality and for regeneration, and this is very much present in the work of the contemporary artists who responded to elements of the RBGE collection. Edinburgh- based photographer Wendy Mcmurdo’s Night Garden is a collection of images she made in lockdown around the surprise flowering of a giant Himalayan lily in her garden. The Cardiocrinum giganteum, planted years before and forgotten, reached a height of 3.5m during the unusually warm spring, in the weeks following Mcmurdo’s mother’s death at the height of the pandemic.
These photographs, shot at night, are a reflection on a dark time, but also capture a surprising flowering in the midst of the darkness. Two further works, from a series entitled Indeterminate objects ( Flora), use video game software to create images which show flowers at different stages of blooming and withering in the same vase.
There is something similar going on in 100 Days with Lily, an early work by Taiwanese- American artist Lee
Mingwei. When his grandmother died, the artist decided to live with a narcissus - or Lent lily - for 100 days, the traditional period of mourning in Taiwanese culture. On large photographic prints he records his daily activities “with Lily” - cooking, sleeping, meditating - and the life of the plant, from its planting through germination, to expiration and finally exhumation, though, if planted again, it will bloom perennially.
A recent work by Mingwei, Invitation for Dawn, is included: visitors to the gallery can sign up for a live online encounter with an opera singer, who will recite a single song to each person, a lockdown version of Mingwei’s project, Sonic Blossom 2013, and a “gift of song” for these troubled times.
Barbadian artist Annalee Davis weaves plants into a much longer history in her series called As if the entanglements of our lives did not matter. Davis lives and works on a former sugar plantation, delving into her mixed- race family history. Her works are made on the pages of the plantation’s old ledgers.
Into the pictures, she weaves drawings of plants from the RBGE collection which are native to the plantation’s soil, blue vervain and sow thistle, plants growing wild but which were believed to have health- giving properties.
Lyndsay Mann’s film, A Desire for Organic Order, was made at the RGBE Herbarium and takes a meander through the history and politics of plant collecting, from Linnaeus to Mary Wollstonecraft,
paying particular attention to the work of the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants, also based at RGBE. Thoughtful and probing, it poses questions about nativeness and belonging, and is best watched right through, but at 56 minutes, represents a significant time commitment.
It’s an exhibition of two halves, with the contemporary and botanical art kept separate until the final room where they are allowed to mingle. It’s a reminder that Inverleith House has been through an uneasy period of transition, with its own tangled roots, and is now engaged in finding the common ground between art and science.
But it is also a hopeful show, illustrating the potential fruitfulness of such collaborations, and the ways in which plants open up much wider conversations about the world at large. It is also reminder that loss, in the plant world, is a precursor to the planting of the next generation of seeds, and the beginnings of growth and renewal.
Until 13 December. Admission is free but visitors must book a ( free) time slot to enter the Gardens, see www. rbge. org. uk