“These twelve vibrantly coloured posters are from a set of 86 acquired for use as instructional and visual aids by William Blaxland Benham, Professor of Biology at the University of Otago from 1898 … they were produced from 1894 onwards, by Fromann & Morian, a printing house in Darmstadt, Germany that existed from 1850 – 1930.” [extract taken from notes displayed by the posters, italics added by me – Liz]
From: A Garden of Earthly Delights (exhibition)
At: Hocken Library, Dunedin, New Zealand
The exhibition runs until August 11, 2019
New Wall Charts For Teaching Natural History
— photos taken by Liz (L) and Nigel (N). We didn’t photo all of the posters.
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Nigel took this photo of the collection (with me getting in the way below). It gives an idea of the size of the display – it looked stunningly gorgeous!
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Notes that accompanied the wall charts. Click on the image to enlarge
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I’ve shown this chart in a previous post but beneath it you’ll see a detail image of the bee – I cropped it from this photo.
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Bee detail
NB: these posters and more can be seen online courtesy of the University of Otago. Follow the link and then you can click on any thumbnail to see a good large-size photo. From there you can click through in slide-show format >> Fromann & Morian posters
This is my fourth post on the exhibition. Click here to see the other posts
Here is a link to Hocken Library website
Text by Liz, photos by Liz and Nigel; Exploring Colour (2019)
These are excellent botanical illustrations. If only the professor could have followed up by arranging for a few that showed species native to New Zealand.
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Thanks Steve. I’m soon to publish another post on the Brendel Models (no NZ models tho’)
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It’s as if the British settlers didn’t think New Zealand had anything worth paying attention to.
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I don’t know enough to be able to comment Steve. Joseph Banks who came with Cook on the first voyage paid plenty of attention to the NZ flora: https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/574 But I imagine in the 1800s it would’ve been pretty challenging to arrange for NZ flora to be modelled by such experts as these.
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Hooray for Banks!
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Beautiful Liz!
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Definitely one of the highlights of the exhibition. Thanks Pete
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Such detail, beautiful renderings.
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The display was beautiful to see and as you’ve observed the detail was amazing. Thank you Sharon
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Interesting and beautiful layouts. Art really.
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They were sure beautiful to look at!
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They’re beautiful posters! I’d love to have the Daucus carota one – I grow it here and it’s a lovely plant. (But I wouldn’t want the Lamium album one because it would remind me of how much that wants to take over my garden! It’s a terrible weed here, grows huge, and is very hard to get rid of!)
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Did you see in the info notes that the charts can still be bought, from Germany? We inherited several Lamium in a past garden.. the lamium with icky pink flowers was a real weed. Another one with colourful foliage and brighter flowers was lovely, quite big in size but didn’t seem to spread too much. A white-flowered one struggled to survive. Gore gardens have a white-flowered one with frosted-type leaves, really pretty, and it seems to be well-behaved. I’ve got photos stashed away on my computer somewhere, it’s very pretty.
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I did see that….hmm! I have read about several garden lamiums, but would be wary of them here. They seem to survive in the driest of soils. (And were about the only thing that could survive when there were huge conifers on the other side of the fence.)
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Just a random thought.. if you’re not already following Judith I think you’d enjoy the blog https://beyondthewindowbox.wordpress.com/
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Yes, you’re right – and I’m now following. Intrigued to see that there are posts about familiar Scottish places – instant nostalgia! Thanks for the suggestion 🙂
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