One of the Christmas carols sung this year by the Library choir was a version of The holly and the ivy. This inspired me to choose greenery associated with Christmas for this year’s festive blog post. Christmas trees (a little more on these later) have had brief mentions in previous years (2020’s A very merry online Christmas and 2014’s Christmas comes but once a year) but other traditional Christmas plants such as holly, ivy and mistletoe are new territory here and provide the opportunity to showcase some wonderful botanical art from across the centuries contained in UL books.

In pre-Christian pagan times evergreen plants were used to help celebrate the winter solstice festival, warding off evil spirits. Later on, the plants were given meaning by the Christian church. The fact that many of us today still continue the ancient tradition of decorating our spaces with greenery is rather pleasing. In my house, we will have a holly wreath on the door, ivy adorning the staircase and the tops of pictures, and mistletoe strategically placed for a kiss or two!

The two illustrations above of ivy and mistletoe are woodcuts by Albrecht Meyer from the groundbreaking 16th century herbal De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (CCD.47.60) by Leonhart Fuchs, after whom the fuchsia is named. These are just two of more than 500 illustrations contained in the book. The clarity and detail of the woodcuts marked this work out from earlier herbals and set a new benchmark for botanical illustration.

Jumping 200 years to the 18th century, our next botanical artist is Elizabeth Blackwell who created her A curious herbal (7340.bb.1-2) as a way to raise some money while her husband was in debtor’s prison. She took on the task of drawing plants from life and turning them into engravings. Her book was successful enough that her husband was released from prison (he was later beheaded in Sweden but that is a story for another time!). Here are her engravings of holly and mistletoe with descriptions by her husband supplied when she visited him (click on the images to see larger versions):

One of the most acclaimed botanical illustrators is Pierre-Joseph Redouté and he contributed illustrations to the second edition of Duhamel’s Traité des arbres et arbustes (MH.1.34-40) in the early 19th century.  Here we have his depictions of holly and mistletoe along with an illustration of ivy in the same work done by Redouté’s contemporary Pancrace Bessa:

A little later in the 19th century William Baxter, curator of Oxford Botanic Gardens, a position he had held since the age of 26, compiled a six-volume work on British flowering plants, British phaenogamous botany (S370.c.83.1-6) and commissioned two local artists to illustrate it. These plates of ivy and mistletoe from volume one, along with the one of holly at the top, were all done by Isaac Russell (and probably coloured by Baxter’s daughters). Not much is known about Russell except that he was a glass painter who lived not far from the Botanic Gardens.

Finally, returning to Christmas trees, as with the subject of last year’s reindeer blog post they are prominent in books for young children, received by the UL under Legal Deposit. Here are the eye-catching and colourful covers of some recent ones:

On behalf of all in Collections and Academic Liaison, Season’s Greetings!

Katharine Dicks