Parents: Read This

It’s a fact: kids can lose valuable reading skills during summer break. It’s called “summer slide,” and the loss can be large—two months worth of lost reading skills is not unusual over the summer, and teachers will tell you that retraining in fall regularly takes up precious class time.

It’s also a fact: by reading just 20 minutes per day, your child maintains his or her reading level through the summer. 

At the Lenhardt Library, our creative librarians have come up with a fun way to help you make the latter happen.

Bookcover: There's a Hair in my Dirt! A Worm's Story.

Bookcover: Homegrown Honey Bees: An Absolute Beginner's Guide.

Bookcover: Compost Stew, An A to Z Recipe for the Earth.

Bookcover: Attracting Butterflies to your Garden.

Bookcover: The Plant Hunters.

Bookcover: Jardineria Facil para Ninos.

Sign up now to be a Summer Nature Explorer at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Between May 31 and August 17, your child can read books and have fun at drop-in activities, earning stamps and prizes—encouragements that help kids stave off reading loss.

It’s also our library’s link to the National Science Foundation’s STEM program (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) that aims to increase science skills in the United States. Here’s the foundation’s interesting and fact-filled site: www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool.

Here’s how our Summer Reading and Nature Program works:

  • Sign up at the Lenhardt Library. Take home a reading and activity log.
  • Read a book; get a stamp. The log helps you keep track of your books.
  • Play at a Family Drop-In Activity; get a stamp. Great for reluctant readers who learn critical thinking skills in different ways.
  • Earn 5 stamps; get a prize. Bring your child to the library for the prize—we don’t want to give away the surprise!
  • Earn 10 stamps; get a prize. At 10 books, the reader earns the temporary frog tattoo shown below.
  • Earn 15 stamps; get a prize. Hint: it’s something to tuck into your backpack for school.
  • Earn 20 stamps; get a big prize. We’ll hand the proud reader a free ticket for his/her admission to Butterflies & Blooms. (Parents, you can sign up, read some great books, and earn your own free ticket, too!) 
  • Here’s the link for more details: chicagobotanic.org/library/summer_reading.

ILLUSTRATION: A cartoon of a frog reading a book.

Not reading yet? Even the pre-K set can sign up! Parents/adults can earn stamps/prizes for littler kids by reading books to them—that’s how a lifelong love of reading begins! (Of course, little kids love getting the same treats as their already-reading siblings, too.)

Of course, members have check-out privileges at the library, but nonmembers are welcome to sit and read—the reading nook (pillows on the floor, kid-sized reading table) has been known to attract many a bookworm parent, too. On the library shelves, look on book spines for:

  • Yellow dots = Books for the 2 to 6 crowd
  • Yellow dots with blue stars = For readers 7 to 10
  • Yellow dots with red stars = Spanish-language books for kids
  • Blue tape = New to our collection!

Family Drop-in Activities shake up the routine with a roster of unusual, nature-based activities: kids might dissect a seed at the Grunsfeld Children’s Growing Garden…or search for underwater creatures at Kleinman Family Cove…or make a samurai mask at the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Japanese Garden. Drop-in activities take place every summer day—for the line-up and locations, go to chicagobotanic.org/forfamilies.

And did we mention that it’s all free?

Happy summer reading, and we look forward to seeing you at the circulation desk!

©2014 Chicago Botanic Garden and my.chicagobotanic.org

Lenhardt Library: New collaborations for future advancement

In early May, I was gratified to hear that the Lenhardt Library’s application to become an affiliate member at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) had been accepted. BHL is an open access, all digital repository of biodiversity literature.

PHOTO: View into the Lenhardt Library at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
The Lenhardt Library is open to the public. Garden members may borrow materials for 28 days.

BHL founding member libraries are based at universities, botanical gardens, and natural history museums, and include renowned institutions such as the Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

These libraries contribute digital scans of books and journals in their collections. All pages are freely accessible through the BHL portal. Constantly updated, as of today, BHL includes 43,697,651 pages of biodiversity literature. Users of biodiversity literature are researchers based around the globe with nodes in Europe, Australia, and China. BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life.

Plans for the Lenhardt Library’s involvement are to contribute literature unique to our collections and not held at other libraries. That may mean adding early volumes that pre-date current content in BHL, filling in missing horticulture resources, or adding volumes from the rare book collection.

Another recent Lenhardt Library affiliation is with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). CRL is a library’s library with holdings of 5 million items. The Lenhardt Library joined this consortium of academic and research libraries to gain access to these materials to fulfill library research needs for the Chicago Botanic Garden’s staff and visitors.

Partnerships and collaborations are vital to small research libraries such as the Lenhardt Library for advancement and growth. Library collections and resource sharing ensures literature is available for study, scholarship, and scientific advancement.


©2014 Chicago Botanic Garden and my.chicagobotanic.org

A practical gift…with a rare provenance

A friend/colleague recently gifted me with a new Chicago Botanic Garden office mug—so appropriate since she knows I don’t go anywhere without a cup of tea. What she didn’t know was that I’d soon be digging into the Rare Book Collection at the Lenhardt Library because of it.

PHOTO: Delicate orchids decorate a white china tea mug.
My new office mug…tells quite a story.

View all the items in the Orchid Show collection.

On the cup is a lovely graphic design of orchids—a topic that’s very top of mind here because of the Orchid Show, now in its final week at the Garden (click here for tickets). Fueled by a new-found love of the family Orchidaceae (a classic case of orchid fever), I took a closer look at the design. Was that a slipper orchid? Which one? What was the story behind it?

Turns out the design stemmed from one of the Garden’s great treasures: our Rare Book Collection. At the Lenhardt Library, director Leora Siegel related the history and details.

The drawings are by Henry Lambert, from a portfolio of 20 plates published as Les Orchidées et les Plantes de Serre; Études. The plates are chromotypogravures (a nineteenth-century French style of photolithography); Paris bookseller Armand Guérinet compiled and issued them in portfolio form, rather than as a book, between 1900 and 1910.

PHOTO: Illustrated orchids from Les Orchidees par Henry Lambert.
The portfolio’s title translates as Orchids and Plants of the Greenhouse; Studies.

The portfolio entered the Garden’s collection in 2002 as part of the purchase of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s rare books. In need of TLC—“bumpy, bruised, and dirty,” according to Siegel—the loose prints were sent for conservation to the prestigious Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in 2011. (Read more about the process in this recent blog.)

Looking lively upon their return in 2012, the plates then became contenders for an interesting project: the development of the Garden’s own line of merchandise to complement the Orchid Show. Of ten finalists, Plate 4 from the portfolio won out, as seen here in the Illinois Digital Archives (page 8).

Two orchids share the plate. The daintier, spotted, clustered flower is identified as Saccolabium giganteum (later re-classified Rhynchostylis gigantea), an orchid that’s native to Myanmar (formerly Burma). In 1893, its habitat was described as “where the hot winds blow and where the thermometer in the dry season is about 45 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade….” (Veitch, A Manual of Orchidaceous Plants…).  The American Orchid Society has a nice write-up about this species and its varieties here.

The slipper orchid Cypripedium schrodere is listed in the 1906 Hortus Veitchii as Cypripedium (Selenipedium) x Schröderae, with the note, “It is one of the finest of the Selenipedia hybrids, and was named as a compliment to the late Baroness Schröder of the Dell, Egham.” Nomenclature for lady slipper orchids gets complicated; the American Orchid Society goes deep into the history here.

PHOTO: Montage of orchid-related products in the Garden Shop.
A Mother’s Day (May 11) gift idea: an exclusive Orchid Show item, plus the promise of a trip to the Orchid Show in 2015!

Next, a graphic design specialist worked with the orchid illustrations, using a bit of creative license to fit the prints to the shape of the products: the cut of a coaster, the drape of a tote, the curve of a coffee cup. From that work came the Garden’s exclusive collection—it’s only available online and at the Garden Shop!—of items that are practical, meant for everyday use, yet connected to a deeper story.

Good design transcends time. It’s quiet, yet thought-provoking. Now that I know the story behind the orchid design, I look at my friend’s gift differently.

Come to think of it, it’s time for a nice cup of tea…

©2014 Chicago Botanic Garden and my.chicagobotanic.org

Feminine Perspective: Women Artists and Illustrators

As I compiled the latest rare book exhibition at the Lenhardt Library, I got to know several fascinating women from the past. They were among the first women to be recognized as botanical illustrators, and their work opened doors for generations of women to follow. The exhibition, Feminine Perspective: Women Artists and Illustrators, running through November 10, traces the development of women in the field of botanical illustration from at-home hobbyists to professional artists who were published under their own names, with their works represented in the respectable journals, displayed in galleries and art shows, and accepted professionally.

ILLUSTRATION: Rigid-leaved Gorteria (Gorteria rigens).
Rigid-leaved gorteria (Gorteria rigens) by Henrietta Moriarty from the Rare Book Collection of the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

For Henrietta Moriarty who published in 1807 London, botany was a moral dilemma. The renowned botanical theory of plant classification by Carl Linnaeus discusses plant reproduction and reproductive plant parts; the material was decidedly not appropriate for a proper Victorian woman and outright dangerous for a young girl. Moriarty solves this moral dilemma by writing and illustrating her own book, Fifty Plates of Green-House Plants, Drawn and Coloured from Nature, with concise descriptions and rules for their culture. Intended for the improvement of young ladies in the art of drawing, second edition, 1807.

Her 50 botanical illustrations are each hand-colored and focused on the beautiful flower with a botanical description but lack any discussion or representation of plant reproductive processes. Moriarty, a widow with children, needed to support her family and found writing and illustrating a botany book to be productive. She presold 180 copies by subscription. View each page of this lovely book online at the Illinois Digital Archives.

ILLUSTRATION: Italian pimpernel (Anagallis monellis).
Italian pimpernel (Anagallis monellis) by Henrietta Moriarty from the Rare Book Collection of the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden

To hear more stories on the personal circumstances and the success of women in botanical illustration, come into the library! We’d love to share more about these illustrators and more:

Henriette Antoinette Vincent (1786 – 1830)
Ellen Robbins (1828 – 1905)
Lady Harriet Ann Thiselton-Dyer (1854 – 1945)

For a schedule of upcoming exhibitions and library talks, click here.


©2013 Chicago Botanic Garden and my.chicagobotanic.org

Butterflies in Print

PHOTO: hand-colored copper engraving.
Hand-colored copper engraving from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium

The Lenhardt Library hosts remarkable exhibitions throughout the year. These exhibitions highlight parts of the collection that visitors might not otherwise see, and the exhibitions are among the Garden’s best-loved secrets! Stacy Stoldt, public services manager of the Lenhardt Library, curated the current exhibition, Butterflies in Print: Lepidoptera Defined, open now through August 18.

By far, the highlight is Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Metamorphosis of Surinam Insects) by Maria Sibylla Merian, published in 1719 in Amsterdam. This volume is on loan from the Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, Bio-Medical Libraries, University of Minnesota.

 

PHOTO: illustration by Maria Sibylla Merian
An illustrated panel by Maria Sibylla Merian

See Butterflies in Print: Lepidoptera Defined at the Lenhardt Library through August 18, 2013.

PHOTO: Anna Maria Sibylla Merian from the 500 DM Banknote.
Maria Sibylla Merian, from the 500 deutsche mark bank note

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was a fascinating woman, artist, and naturalist. While she was known for her watercolor paintings of flowers and insects, embroidery patterns, and copper engravings, she is also credited with being the founder of German entomology. At age 13 she began studying the metamorphoses of silkworms and butterflies. After five years of intense study, Merian found that adult insects actually lay eggs, disproving the earlier theory that caterpillars were born out of spontaneous generation.

Divorced in 1699, she traveled with her daughter Dorothea to the Dutch Colony of Surinam (now known as Suriname) that same year to continue her entomological work and art. Her spectacular artistic abilities and scientifically accurate representations make Metamorphosis of Surinam Insects a monumental tome. Carl Linnaeus consulted Merian’s illustrations in the course of his taxonomic work in the eighteenth century. Nine species of butterflies, six plants, and two beetles were named for her. She is still a well-known historic figure today and is represented on the 500 deutsche mark bank note and a German postage stamp; she was the subject of Google’s Doodle of the day on April 2, 2013, celebrating her 366th birthday.

Butterflies in Print was designed to complement the Butterflies & Blooms exhibition that showcases native and tropical live butterflies; Maria may have even seen some of these species in Suriname 300 years ago!

Want to know more about our rare books? Read Stories from the Rare Book Collection, monthly highlights from our collection written by curator Ed Valauskas.


©2013 Chicago Botanic Garden and my.chicagobotanic.org