This lovely, elegant object comes in a light brown, hard-sided box that opens like a book. Lifting the cover reveals the slim volume, with its own cover in the same tone and texture as the box. An attached ribbon lifts it out.
“This is an accordion-bound artist’s book with eight traditional Japanese woodcuts illustrating small flowers which inhabit the limestone barrens along the West Coast and Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland,” Jones explains in an email. “It is a collaboration with Michael Burzynski, who selected the eight plants included in the book and provided the text which accompanied each image.
Burzynski, a naturalist, writer, interpretive planner, and ecosystem scientist with Parks Canada, selected the flowers to be included on the basis of their unique stories.”
Each entry includes the flower’s name in English and Latin, genus, and family, and a blend of physical, historical, and lyrical description.
The facing page features Jones’ prints.
“I have collaborated with poets on two previous artist book projects,” Jones continued. “With this book, I looked forward to working with Michael, who writes so lucidly about these plants, to tell their stories rather than (simply present information) in a dry, ‘scientific’ manner.”
For example: “Yellow lady’s-slipper; Cypripède soulier / Cypripedium Parviflorum / Orchid Family (Orchidaceae) / Clusters of egg-shaped ‘slippers’ bob and shake with each gust of wind. These flowers are dressed for business, luring bumblebees and other pollinators with sweet scent and a red lip that surrounds the mouth of each pouch-shaped lower petal. But these flowers are deceivers — there is no nectar reward. Once inside a flower, insects must push past the flower’s reproductive parts—depositing pollen sacs from previous flowers, and becoming plastered with sticky new packets of pollen as they leave.”
Readers learn “This genus gets its name from Cipris — ‘Lady of Cyprus’ — another name for Aphrodite, Greek goddess of passion, beauty, and procreation; and from pedilon, Greek for ‘sandal.’”
We are also told where this “uncommon herbaceous perennial” grows, and its measurements.
For Jones, “this project emanated from a 2008 exhibition/installation I had at MUN Botanical Gardens. That installation consisted of three small accordion-bound artist’s books, each with eight to ten traditional Japanese woodblock prints of flowers that one would encounter on walks on the limestone barrens of Western Newfoundland. The books were displayed at eye level on shelves in long plexiglass cases. Burzynski contributed information on the various flowers, and his descriptions, which told the fascinating story of each plant, were succinct and accessible to the layperson.”
Other entries in “Colours” include “Purple mountain saxifrage … a welcome sign that spring has finally arrived”; “Laurentian primrose … rarely found out of sight of salt water”; “Dwarf hawksbeard … Like many northern species, this tiny plant survives by being small”; the “Barrens willow (whose) growth rate is more like that of a lichen than of a tree”; and “Fernald’s braya … one of the three species of Newfoundland and Labrador wildflowers that grow nowhere else on Earth.”
Jones’ illustrations seem to bloom from a gossamery brush, almost as if they were poured onto the page. Each is realistically coloured and detailed and yet materialize as ephemerally as a breath, or a dream.
“The format and subject of the book meld two approaches to and understanding of nature,” Jones said. One is “often associated with the West and scientific rationalism of botanical illustration rooted in precise depiction, categorization, naming, and locating of the plants,” while the other is “often associated with Eastern aesthetic.”
Thus these artworks, on very lightly coloured backgrounds, manage to nod towards botanical tradition and also enhance and underscore the flowers’ tenacious delicacy.
Many of these subjects are rare, and a few endangered. That they exist at all is a wonder, and their treatment and even celebration here is wonder-full.
The letterpress and binding is by Timothy Dyck, with whom Jones has worked on five other book projects.
The book will be on view at the newly renovated Corner Brook Museum and Archives when it reopens (probably in June) and is available through Gallery 78 in Fredericton, N.B.
There are also some individual prints available at the Craft Council shop (craftcouncilnl.ca).
Joan Sullivan is editor of Newfoundland Quarterly magazine. She reviews both fiction and non-fiction for The Telegram.
