In 2015, I published Plant Life - a Brief History. The illustrations in the book were all in black and white. To find appropriate color drawings and photos, to get permissions for them, and to print them, would have made this modest project prohibitively expensive. The blessing in disguise, however, was the discovery of numerous exquisite line drawings, crafted with great care for detail, in the classical textbooks of the last two centuries. They don't make them like that anymore! More recent textbooks rely on color photographs, and often lack such detailed representation.
In the past decade, advances in colorization tools have made it possible to bring new life to ancient illustrations, and so, I have prepared an abbreviated version of my book, centered around newly revitalized and colored drawings from the original text, with a few new ones thrown in. It is all here in this blog site, totally free and without advertisements. I hope this will bring the ideas of the book to new audiences, and stimulate more interest in plants and the science of Botany.
As in the original book, I proceed from the simplest photosynthetic organisms, the Cyanobacteria, to the most sophisticated, the Angiosperms. In each chapter I highlight and illustrate the key adaptations that led to ever more plant complexity.
If you find any errors, have suggestions or comments, please email me at botanyprofessor.gmail.com.
Access the chapters of the book below.
1. The Origins of Photosynthesis and the Cyanobacteria
2. Eukaryotic Life and the Algae
3. Plants Invade the Land and the Bryophytes
4. Vascular Tissues and the Seedless Vascular Plants
6. Darwin's Abominable Mystery: the Origin of Flowering Plants
7. Adaptations for Pollination and Seed Dispersal
9. The Monocots
The references for the sources of all the illustrations are below. Uncredited illustrations are my own.
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