Old plants live again in NYBG show

Beyond the conservatories, research facilities and sophisticated greenhouses of the New York Botanical Garden, there is another treasure. While plant science and taxonomy have matured alongside NYBG’s annual shows and outreach programs, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library has amassed one of the largest botanical and horticultural research libraries in the world.

Those holdings are the focus of “Flora Illustrata,” an exhibit running through Sunday, Feb. 22. Although housed in a single room, the histories and biographies along with the sheer ambition in their pages provide boundless riches.

Take the rare second edition of Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin’s “Selectarum stirpium Americanarum historia,” in which every last peony, anemone and butterfly was painted by hand around 1780. The work is both a monument of aesthetics and testimony to the Austrian author’s fascination with the young United States. His other expeditions took him south toward the Caribbean, where he twice lost troves of floral specimens: once to shipwreck, and once to pirates.

Or take the copper plate engravings of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an erratic genius born in Turkey whose prolific work in North America — in fields from botany to prehistoric earthworks and ancient Mesoamerican linguistics — went unrecognized in his lifetime. Compulsively documenting the minutiae of his explorations, Mr. Rafinesque noted: “The following plates are the proofs of plates lost in my shipwreck [off Long Island] of 1815.”

The curiosities in the show also include the first do-it-yourself garden architecture layout manual, from 1709; plans for gardens along the Hudson River; and bright sketches of acorns by the American botanist William Whitman Bailey.

“It’s as if in telling the history of oak trees, Americans were finding ways of telling their own story,” said Vanessa Bezemer Sellers, the Botanical Garden’s humanities research coordinator and the co-editor of the exhibit’s companion volume.