“The botanical illustration is the perfect intersection of art and science, documenting and recording plants and their uses long before the advent of photography. As early as the 1st century BC when Greek physician Cretavas recorded the medicinal use of plants for the Codex Vindobonensis, scientist-artists were tasked to accurately draw and paint botanical specimens. Illustrators were particularly busy during the Age of Exploration, being brought along on naval expeditions across the oceans to log the flora and fauna of these “new worlds.” I work at the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, where we have works in our collection by the Canadian artist Victor Doray, who began his career as a medical artist and was the founding director of the Department of Biomedical Communications at UBC in 1957. It’s terrific to think that even in the middle of the 20th century, hand drawings were created and valued for more than aesthetic reasons.

Shaggy Mane mushrooms, which can be found all over campus in the fall, are known as ink caps because they darken as they age and, more significantly, deteriorate quickly after being picked until they liquefy into a pool of inky black fluid. One October while visiting my brother and his family in Armstrong, BC, we came out late from Rosie’s Pub at the Armstrong Hotel and very literally stumbled upon a huge patch of Shaggy Manes. We had coincidentally just been reading about these edible gems in the Pub, which was lined at that time with shelves and shelves of reference books. In the darkness, we found a garbage bag and rather rapaciously harvested the mushrooms, imagining a wonderful soup for Thanksgiving dinner the next evening. In what turned out to be a fortunate event, we forgot the bag of mushrooms on the back porch that night; the next morning, there was nothing left but a river of black ink running down the stairs and into the garden.”

Jana Tyner, Communications and Publications / Assistant to the Director at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.