A Banksia Album Two Hundred Years of Botanical Illustration

About this book

With their bold flowering and fruiting spikes, banksias remain a favourite among artists and gardeners alike. A Banksia Album features over 90 stunning full-colour reproductions of watercolours, pencil and sepia-wash drawings, colour prints and early hand-coloured engravings and lithographs of banksias from the National Library of Australia’s collections. It covers over two centuries of botanical illustration, from 1770 when the Endeavour’s artist, Sydney Parkinson, was the first European to make drawings of banksias at Botany Bay, to 2007 with two prints of Banksia rosserae by Celia Rosser.

Apart from these two artists, the works of 46 others are in this publication, including:

- Ferdinand Bauer
- Frederick Polydore Nodder
- George Loddiges
- Pierre-Joseph Redouté
- William Jackson Hooker
- John and Elizabeth Gould
- Henry Constantine Richter
- Rosa Catherine Fiveash
- Edward William Minchin
- Adam Forster
- Ebenezer Edward Gostelow
- Marianne Collinson Campbell
- Ellis Rowan
- Ida McComish
 

Author Alex George is a well-known Australian botanist and a leading authority on banksias. His introduction to A Banksia Album provides a fascinating account of the history of the collecting of banksia specimens and their portrayal by artists over the years. The ‘album’ part of the book is divided into 29 sections, ordered alphabetically by species. Notes about the naming of each species accompany the images and there are short biographies of the artists presented at the end of the book.

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