Monday, October 25, 2010

Africana


To continue on with my jungle-pattern obsession, last weekend we went for a holiday to Daylesford in the countryside, and I managed to book "the Zebra Room" at the Manse. It was pretty awesome and had an array of verging-on-hilarious-but-kind-of-cool african-based prints and decor.
Zebra bath!
Mantlepiece Hippo....

The bed head was an amazing print of a Victorian-era botanical drawing, for which I also have a fetish at the moment.
I just bought a beautiful book called "Botanical Riches; stories of botanical exploration" by Richard Aitken. It charts the exploration and documentation of the world's flora by all the major colonial powers from Egypt and Islam, though to Asia and Great Britain.

Left: Franz Antoine, Die Coniferen nach Lambert, Loudon und Anderen. Nut from the Australian Bunya Pine.
Right: Henry Andrews, The Botanist's Repository, 1806. North American Aloe Agave americana and vanilla, below.

British manuscript album "Shrubs and Trees"1802-4. Rhododendron arboreum, the national flower of Nepal, bought to England by Thomas Hardwicke.

I find the precision and delicacy of these beautiful works both calming and enlightening; I love that people were drawing like this, sketch book on their knees, out in the wilds, wherever crown and country let them sail.



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