Plant Transformations, Observations, and Interactions, 2019

Papermaking is a visceral, transformative experience that can connect people to specific places, memories, and nature. Horticulture, biodiversity, and ethnobotony are three research aspects of the Missouri Botanical Garden (MoBot) that are explored through hand papermaking in this large format artist’s book by Megan Singleton. In the fall of 2018, Singleton began collaborating with the horticulture staff of MoBot to collect a variety of plant species from the garden as they were being pruned back for winter. Twenty different plants, that would have otherwise been compost, were collected, processed, and transformed into unique sheets of handmade paper by the artist for this project. The Missouri Botanical Garden is home to the second largest herbarium in the United Sates, and is one of the largest collections in the world.

The second and third sections of the book highlight the global missions of MoBot in respect to taxonomy, biodiversity, and ethnobotony. Selected herbarium specimens from Bolivia, collected during a ten-year collaborative project between the National Herbarium of Bolivia and MoBot, have been embedded into handmade paper to draw attention to such projects. This collaborative research project, “ Floristic Inventory of the Madidi Region”, came about in response to the lack of information about the Biodiversity found in Bolivia, and over the last ten years project scientists found more than 8,500 species of plants, 144 of them new to science. The book begins and ends with an ethno botanical look into how plants, when transformed into paper, are used by different cultures for creating art. This book in itself is an example of that, and concludes with a sampling of handmade papers from around the world, collected by ethnobotanist James Lucas, and made for the purpose of origami.