Academic literature on the topic 'Botanical illustration Australia'

The Australian National Botanic Gardens plays an important role in the study and promotion of Australia's diverse range of unique plants through its living collection, scientific research activities and also through the art collection held in the institution's Library and Archives. Australia's history of formal botanical illustration began with the early voyages of discovery with its popularity then declining until the modern day revival in botanical art. The Australian National Botanic Gardens Library and Archives art collection holds works from the Endeavour voyage through to the more contemporary artists of Celia Rosser, Collin Woolcock, Gillian Scott and Aboriginal artists including Teresa Purla McKeeman as well as photographs and outdoor installations.

Several range disjunctions have been identified in the Australian species of the genus Terminalia L. Field studies and examination of herbarium specimens of taxa with range disjunctions have demonstrated that taxonomic changes are justified. Detailed morphological studies of the Terminalia canescens (DC.) Radlk. species complex showed that four taxa should be recognised. The name Terminalia circumalata F.Muell. is resurrected as a taxon endemic to the Pilbara region, with T. canescens not occurring in that region. The distinction of Terminalia bursarina F.Muell., T. canescens and T. pterocarya F.Muell. is also supported. Terminalia cunninghamii C.A.Gardner has been considered to have a disjunct range between the far north and south-west of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Terminalia kumpaja R.L.Barrett is described as a new species to accommodate the disjunct southern populations because morphological examination has shown them to be distinct. Terminalia kumpaja is restricted to the Dampier Botanical District. Full descriptions and illustrations of key identifying features are provided for these species. Keys to all Australian Terminalia species are presented. Additional species with disjunct distributions that warrant further study are noted. Lectotypes are selected for Terminalia circumalata and T. rogersii W.Fitzg.

A taxonomic revision of the genus Hydriastele H.Wendl. & Drude in New Guinea, Australia and immediately adjacent islands is presented. We recognise 25 species from this area including three new species of robust tree palms from New Guinea: Hydriastele calcicola, H. lanata and H. wosimiensis. All species are described in full in the taxonomic treatment, with accompanying botanical illustrations, photographs, distribution maps and preliminary IUCN Red List Assessments. In addition, a key to the species in New Guinea and Australia is provided as well as a systematic conspectus placing all 39 accepted species of Hydriastele in an informal infrageneric framework.

The Irish botanist William Henry Harvey (1811–1866), who came of Quaker stock, published more than 130 books, papers and pamphlets during his lifetime. He also drew and lithographed at least one thousand illustrations, mainly of marine algae from North America, the British Isles and Australia, but also flowering plants of southern Africa and California, and mosses from the Indian subcontinent and southern Africa. This annotated bibliography also includes his non-botanical works.

The study of ancient Greek and Latin in Australia and New Zealand, especially at Sydney Church of England Grammar School in New South Wales, produced this century a number of leading scholars who made a major contribution to the study of Old World archaeology in Europe and Australia this century. Among them were V. G. Childe, T. J. Dunbabin, J. R. Stewart and A. D. Trendall. In developing their respective fields of expertise, all spent some time in Greece, as students, excavators, research workers and soldiers, and had formative links with the British School at Athens. Australia's debt to the Classics is reflected not only in the life-long attachment to their legacy, and to Greece, by the former Prime Minister, the Hon. E. G. Whitlam, but in the perpetuation of their influence in such Colonial and modern structures as the monument of Lysicrates in Sydney's Botanic Gardens and the National Library and new Parliament House in Canberra, and in an official poster illustrating multiculturalism in Australia. Despite their role in shaping Australia's European history, the teaching of Classics is under threat as never before, and the late Enoch Powell, at one time Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Sydney, has stigmatised the obscurantism which threatens to impoverish if not undermine Western civilisation by closing access to knowledge of our Classical past.

The seagrass genus Halophila Thouars has more than twenty described species and is predominately distributed over a wide geographic range along the tropical and the warm temperate coastlines in the Indo-West Pacific Oceans. A brief history of the Halophila taxonomic development is presented. Based on reproductive and vegetative morphology, the genus is divided into eight sections including three new sections: section Australes, section Stipulaceae and section Decipientes. A rewritten taxonomic description of the type species for the genus Halophila,H. madagascariensis Steudel ex Doty et B.C. Stone, is provided. The lectotype of H. engelmannii Asch. as well as neotypes of H. hawaiiana Doty et B.C. Stone and H. spinulosa (Br.) Asch. are designated. Furthermore, H. ovalis ssp. bullosa, ssp. ramamurthiana and ssp. linearis together with H. balforurii have been recognised as distinct species. Nomenclature, typification, morphological description and botanical illustrations are presented for each taxon. Recent molecular phylogenetic surveys on certain Halophila taxa are also discussed. Field surveys for the deep water Halophila in West Pacific regions are suggested. Morphological studies combined with molecular investigations for the Halophila on the east coast of Africa and the West Indian Ocean are urgently needed and highly recommended.

In Australia the stringybark group of eucalypts comprises at least 25 species of Eucalyptus from the botanical series Capitellatae. The species are abundant in south-eastern Australia, and four groups (white, yellow, brown and red) of the commercial timber come mainly from Victoria and New South Wales and these include E. baxteri (Benth.) Maiden, E. globoidea Blakely & Blakely, E. macrorhyncha F. Muell. ex Benth., and E. muelleriana Howitt. As with the ‘ash group’ of eucalypts, the timbers are similar in appearance, and although they are heavier than the ash group, there are some overlapping characteristics. Two additional species, E. consideniana Maiden (yertchuk) and E. sieberi L.A.S. Johnson (silvertop ash), outside the stringybark group, were studied as their woods also closely resemble those from the stringybark group.Differences were found between the species in vessel diameter and density, ray content, amount of axial parenchyma, distinctness of growth rings, basic density and wood colour. Most of the useful differences arise from extremes of these characteristics. Eucalyptus macrorhyncha (red stringybark) can be identified when the pore number is greater than 15/mm2, the average maximum tangential diameter is less than 140 μm, by ray width and content and from the definite pink-reddish colour. Eucalyptus sieberi can be distinguished definitely from E. muelleriana, and fairly certainly from E. globoidea and E. baxteri by uniformly distributed deposits in the rays. Considerable overlap in wood structure exists among E. muelleriana, E. globoidea and E. baxteri making their separation on wood characteristics impractical. Photomicrographs illustrating various points have been included together with a key for separation between the species studied. Similarities to other species including E. acmenoides, E. microcorys, E. obliqua, E. phaeotricha, and E. pilularis are discussed.

Lourens Baas Becking (1895-1963) was a Dutch plant physiologist, trained in the Botanical Laboratory of Utrecht University. After graduating in 1919, he worked in America at Stanford University, where he obtained his Doctor’s degree in 1921. From 1928, he was Herzstein Professor of Biology and Director of the Jacques Loeb Physiological Laboratory at the Hopkins Marine Station in Palo Alto. In 1931, he became Professor of General Botany at the University of Leiden. There, he and his staff and students continued to work on the research of microorganisms under extreme saline conditions. In 1939, he was appointed Director of the institutes of the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg (Bogor) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). In May 1940, when the war broke out, he was in Leiden to retire from his professorship. The war prevented his return to his family and the institutes in the East Indies. Baas Becking made several failed attempts to escape to England. These resulted in imprisonments by the German occupying authorities in Scheveningen (1940-1941) and in Utrecht and the German Zuchthaus in Siegburg (1944-1945). An ordeal that he barely survived due to the inhuman situation in the penitentiary and typhus. In July and August 1944, as a prisoner of the German Kriegsmarine in Utrecht, he wrote in seven weeks a manuscript of Geobiology, an essay on the relationship between living organisms and the earth. It was an update of his earlier ideas. Baas Becking had been inspired by Lawrence Henderson’s The Fitness of the Environment (1913), Victor Moritz Goldschmidt's Der Stoffwechsel der Erde (1922) and Grundlagen der quantitativen Geochemie (1933), Alfred J. Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1924) and Vladimir Vernadsky’s La Géochimie (1924). They were with Frank W. Clarke’s The Data of Geochemistry (1916), sources for his perception of The Universality of Life in 1927, which integrated Vernadsky’s concepts of biosphere and geosphere. Long before James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis defined the Gaia hypothesis in the early 1970s, Baas Becking discussed Gaia or Life and Earth in his inaugural address in 1931. In this tract he also succinctly summarised the ubiquity hypothesis, borrowed from the work of Martinus Beijerinck, as “Everything is everywhere, but the Milieu selects.” The biological “law” was further elaborated in Geobiologie of inleiding tot de milieukunde (1934, English version 2016, Baas Becking’s Geobiology). In the Utrecht prison Baas Becking wrote his scientific testament. In the ten years since the publication of Geobiologie, he “wished to do justice to the work that was performed in Leiden by so many workers”, in an English textbook. With a limited access to scientific literature, he wrote the manuscript Geobiology in a ledger in a barely legible handwriting. The document reflected his vast biological knowledge and his idea of mutual dependence of vital-units (cells, tissues, organs, organism, communities), either of a parasitic, mutualistic or commensalistic character. This relationship was elaborated in his model of symbiosis. His description of the role of man in Geobiology is a personal complaint of a geobiologist over the disastrous treatment of the earth by man. With his concept of “dissipation”, he introduced a material analogue for “the entropy lowering capacity of living systems”. It summarised his conviction that the human intellect and life condition were attributes of free will. Although Geobiology (1944) remained unfinished and had major gaps, it still is an inspiring memoir of a scientist who records his enlightened vision on the relationship between life and earth. In this issue of Geochemical Perspectives the manuscript of Geobiology is integrally transcribed, annotated, edited and introduced by Dr. Alexander J.P. Raat, who graduated in 1974 in Leiden as a plant physiologist. The transcript is published with the original illustrations. A sketch of Baas Becking’s life and works is part of the introduction. The annotation and introduction refer to many of his published and unpublished studies. Among these is an unpublished, further updated and revised version of Geobiology, which he completed in 1953 in Australia.

AbstractHedychium gardnerianum Sheph. ex Ker Gawl. is one of the 100 world's worst invasive alien species and the research target in areas as diverse as biological control, natural fibres uses, taxonomy or the biological activity of its compounds. This review aimed to clarify the taxonomic status and the native range of H. gardnerianum and bring accuracy to the history of its introduction and escape from cultivation through the analysis of the increasing number of accessible digitalized dry specimens and grey literature. The analysis of the available information allowed to conclude that: (a) Hedychium gardnerianum is a validly published name, the authority of the name is Sheph. ex Ker Gawl., the species holotype is the illustration published along with the species name, and the Natural History Museum BM000574691 specimen collected in 1815 is the first dried specimen of H. gardnerianum; (b) This species is native to the Central and Eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Northeast India and North Myanmar; (c) The species was cultivated at Cambridge Botanical Garden since 1818 and the first known herbarium specimen collected in Europe dates back to 1821; (d) Kathmandu (Nepal) and Khasi Hills (India) specimens are considered two varieties of the same species and the BM000574691 specimen is the lectotype of H. gardnerianum var. speciosum; (e) Specimens, references, and/or pictures support that H. gardnerianum escaped from cultivation at Galicia (Spain), Azores archipelago, Madeira, Tenerife, Cuba, Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, Ascension, Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Réunion, Mauritius, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, and Vietnam; and (f) H. gardnerianum is a serious pest in Azores, Madeira, Jamaica, Réunion, New Zealand and Hawaii and continues to expand its distribution area in South and Central America, Australia and Southern Africa. This review presents linear raw information compiled with precision, allowing the world databases updating their data but also gives the most detailed information possible to each country/region identifying new regions of concern and updating the invasiveness status in each region.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Mangroves have always been present in my life growing up and living in NSW. Up until 2009 I had considered them functional yet not overly attractive plants. A visit to the Daintree River in tropical Far North Queensland changed my opinion forever. The beauty and unique characteristics of mangroves captivated me and I was compelled to document them. I learned that mangroves are a diverse and vulnerable community of intertidal plants facing many threats including those associated with climate change and willful destruction by humans. The result of my research is 33 scientifically accurate watercolour illustrations of Australia's mangrove species broadly appealing to those interested in botany, botanical illustration and the visual arts.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Ludwig Leichhardt is synonymous with Australian exploration, yet his achievements extend well beyond the success of his overland expeditions. Beyond exploration, Leichhardt was a passionate observer of Australian natural history, who left a significant legacy of collected and written material, especially in the field of botany. The recent translations of his diaries recorded between 1842 and 1844 have exposed a lesser known period of Leichhardt’s life and helped to evidence him as a capable and diligent scientist. The published materials combined with Leichhardt’s collected plant specimens establish the foundation for my research and have subsequently informed my outcomes. From my research I have painted a series of botanical illustrations depicting specimens that were observed, recorded and collected by Leichhardt more than 170 years ago. The documentation of this research and creative methodology from field observations through to the final illustrations visually depicts Leichhardt’s historical contribution to Australian botanical science while providing information on creative process to botanical illustrators.