Passiflora Tendrils (Passiflora vitifolia) - Fantasy Art in Nature

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Every book I recommend I usually own myself or at least have read it once and found it to be interesting or very useful. The reason I am providing links to the Amazon site is not only that I am almost always buying from them, but this site also provides a lot of extra information. Of course, I like to check eBay and other similar places before I buy, but I usually end up buying from Amazon as their price is, in most cases, lower than even those on auctions. Not to mention they are a fast and reliable service. This not only applies to books but also to some camera equipment. The best example is memory cards. We never have enough storage for pictures when shooting, do we?

Links to external sites of similar contest are those I use very often myself and found them to be very helpful in gathering information, but I can not be responsible for their contest.

Recommended Books and Links section is not a comprehensive bibliography but rather a personal choice of books, articles, and web links.

"Whatever your level of interest or curiosity, Vanderplank has provided the information for further exploration. Separate chapters explain the classification and structure of passion flowers, the legend and etymology, cultivation, propagation, hybridization, pests and diseases, and the unique interactions of butterflies and passion flowers. The bulk of the book provides detailed information on 100 taxa, including specific botanical descriptions, along with a narrative covering their discovery, distribution, and the author's experience with these species or hybrids. Appending the text is a useful identification key in chart form, lists of addresses and suppliers, a glossary, and a brief bibliography. . . . John Vanderplank's Passion Flowers is the most comprehensive work on the subject in more than fifty years." -- Steven Foster, American Horticulturist (review of the first edition)

"Lost flower of the Andes is blooming in Britain." This headline in the Daily Telegraph celebrated the last remaining example of Passiflora lourdesae, a herbaceous climber from a rapidly developing region of Venezuela that was raised from a cutting by John Vanderplank -- the only successful attempt from a dozen cuttings sent to botanists around the world. The story of this dramatic recovery from extinction is one of the delights of this new edition of Passion Flowers. This edition adds 53 new species, bringing the total number of species documented to over 150, and includes 41 new color photographs. The book now illustrates nearly a quarter of all known species. In addition there are 50 new line drawings -- all showcased in a new, larger format.

Every biology student knows Ernst Haeckel as the originator of the "Biogenetic Law": ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Haeckel was a passionate student of the evolutionary shaping of biological forms, and Art Forms in Nature captures both his artistic sensibility and the scientific rigor he applied to all his studies. First published in 1904, Art Forms in Nature is a glorification of function and form, a demonstration of organic symmetry that has nothing--and everything--to do with nature as it actually exists. Each plate exhibits organisms carefully arranged and exquisitely detailed, "a symbiosis between decorative sketches and descriptive observations of nature," as Olaf Breidbach states in his fascinating introductory text. The radiolarians, medusae, rotifers, bryozoans, and even frogs and turtles lovingly recreated here are gorgeous and self-explanatory, rendered in delicate, filigreed lines, and colored gently with muted green, delicate pink, and sepia. Art students will appreciate the designs found in nature--scientists will love the evolutionary statement of form inherent in the beauty. --Therese Littleton

Nature in Design: The Shapes, Colors and Forms that Have Inspired Visual Invention

by Alan Powers

Nature in Design cleverly juxtaposes images of things natural and man-made: an armadillo and the hooded roof of Jørn Utzon's Sidney Opera House, the Finnish woodlands and an interior by Alvar Aalto, a bird's nest and a "cocoon lounge" from the 1960s, a fish skeleton and Santiago Calatrava's Lyon Station. The photographs alone will amuse and amaze, but Alan Powers's book could also serve as an insightful, intelligent introduction to basic principles of design, which are nearly always based on or in reaction to the natural world, as those principles have shifted over time.

Nature is the ultimate inspiration for artists, graphic designers, fashion designers, and interior decorators. By seeing lavish color photos of nature's influence on where we live and what we wear, it's easy to understand today's big return to natural design. You'll get to examine a saguaro cactus as a model of skyscraper engineering, an airport inspired by bat wings, and a London apartment inspired by cliff-dwelling tribes. Then you learn what influences you as, for example, you view the many natural objects that curl and coil into spirals (shells, nests, flowers, feathers, ferns, galaxies, hurricanes, the DNA molecule). Or, ask yourself why broccoli forms a fractal. Or, how a bird's feather makes a perfect kind of clothing.

Karl Blossfeldt: 1865-1932

by Hans Christian Adam, Karl Blossfeldt

Featuring highlights culled from our photo series title, this book is a pure delight. Blossfeldt's stunning black-and-white photographs of flowers transcend the genre with their deep tones, architectural forms, and timeless beauty.

When Karl Blossfeldt published Art Forms in Nature in 1928, he made photographic history and became an instant celebrity. The public loved the world of tiny shapes and organic monumentality revealed in his enlargements of flowers and seeds, stems and leaves. Yet Blossfeldt did not consider himself a photographer. He produced his beautiful studies of plant forms to illustrate the courses he taught on architecture at Berlin's School of Arts and Crafts. For 30 years he used the same painstaking method. He would make long journeys into the countryside to select his specimens, which tended to be hardy weeds rather than cultivated flowers. He then prepared them against a neutral cardboard background in various ways designed to avoid camera shake, then photographed in extreme close-up with a homemade plate camera equipped with a very long bellows. Plants gave Blossfeldt a constant supply of graceful designs in which organic growth modified the basic symmetry of natural forms. Unfurling ferns resemble Gothic tracery or a bishop's crosier, a seed pod suggests a medieval weapon, reed stems look like skyscrapers. This beautifully produced book contains 348 illustrations, including all of the plates in Blossfeldt's three books of 1928, 1932, and 1942 plus 30 large unpublished images made in his childhood home in the Harz Mountains of Germany. Blossfeldt's visual discoveries transport viewers into a fairyland of art deco patterns and shapes; every page of this book is a delightful surprise. If there is a gardener in your life, this is the perfect gift. --John Stevenson

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