Through the lens of the Basel Botanical Garden, the art project created during the residency for femalecreatives.ch celebrates the legacy of several women who devoted their lives to botanical art.
The women who pursued botany in past centuries tell a story of courage.
They were travelers, pioneers in the search for rare plant species, and skilled painters.
They achieved significant scientific results, journeyed across continents, and published books—yet their contributions were often overlooked or less documented than those of their male peers.
Some plants still bear their names in recognition. Marianne North, for example, is commemorated in species such as Nepenthes northiana, Crinum northianum, and Kniphofia northiae.
She once spent a year living in a hut deep in the Brazilian rainforest to paint native plants in their natural habitat, writing that she worked “amid all these wonders seeming to taunt us mortals for trespassing on fairies’ ground.”
Before the invention of photography, detailed illustration was the only way to visually document the characteristics of plant species.
The Basel Botanical Garden, one of the oldest in Europe, features seven greenhouses, each replicating the climate and soil of different latitudes.
The most fascinating is undoubtedly the Nebelwaldhaus, which recreates a cloud forest—an exceptionally fragile type of rainforest that today accounts for only about 1% of the world’s forested areas and is highly threatened by climate change.
Botanical gardens are like microcosms, offering the possibility to travel the world through plants.
Outside the greenhouses, conditions are often unsuitable for many species. The landscape does not surround the plants, but rather lives on in the plant’s own memory, allowing foreign species to adapt to an artificial environment.
In botanical art, plants are portrayed within a clearly defined frame, isolated from their natural context. Similarly, the plants living in the artificial environment of a botanical garden carry within them the memory of the landscapes where they once grew.
That memory—preserved in each of them—is reawakened.