Ithaca Garden Network

Nowadays Breck's and Spring Hill are pounding my mailbox and my inbox with special offers and bright pictures of the latest double hybrid flowers at one penny prices. I did fall for some hellebores and heleniums that will serve next year to shorten the winter. I do not find myself otherwise flipping through the pages dreamily: something about double hybrids takes the natural out of the gardening.

Today was different. We went after work to Milly Acharya's artist reception and gallery talk at Mann Library at Cornell. Milly is a botanical illustrator, artist, avid gardener, and neighbor. About twenty of her watercolors are on display, among them flowers, vegetables, and fruits.

It was my first to see so many of her works live, with time to look, and a magnifying glass (available at the exhibit). Artistically I was struck by the balance between "showing the flower as it is" and the play of vibrant colors and fine lines to imbue them with a sense of life and dimension. The level of detail is stunning - not so much because of the shear level of work that goes into producing that level of detail, but because she studies a given plant for weeks at all stages of life and manages to capture its uniqueness in watercolor.

The range of plants represented is both international and local. Milly is a Bengali as well as an Ithacan of 20 years. Some of the subjects are tropical: Valencia oranges and bougainvillea. Others evoke her memories of winter gardens in northern India. Winter gardens there are summer gardens here in Ithaca. Delphinium, larkspur, foxglove, and hollyhock represent the English cottage garden aesthetic of the Calcutta winter garden, before the heat comes to kill off the pansies and the petunias. Then there are the flowers that evoke local memories - wait a second, I saw those torch lilies, nasturtiums, and poppies in your garden! The wisteria grows nearby, and the solomon's seal, lily of the valley, and forget me nots are from the garden across the street. Milly's garden is as much a garden for specimens as anything else. In the summer she works round the clock getting the plants at just the right moment of birth, bud, bloom, and death to make a proper botanical illustration. The wisteria painting she says took 650 hours to paint.

Afterward I asked my daughter what she thought of the paintings. "Lovely," she said, "I especially liked the orange and the fruits because they looked so tasty." Please write below if you have visited this exhibit and what you think - I would love to hear.

The exhibition, titled "Chronicling Brief Lives: Botanical Portraits in Water Color," is on display on the second floor of Mann Library at Cornell until February 24th. The paintings can also be viewed on her website at http://botanix.org .

Tags: botanical illustration, art exhibit, mann library