Botanica - Novisali

When Nature Abstracts Itself

Novisali Novisali — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:10:48 +0000

When Nature Abstracts Itself — Lines, Layers, and Living Patterns

There are moments when nature feels like it is painting itself — silently, without pigment or brush.

A cactus spine crossing another, the spiral of a pine cone, the clustered rhythm of tiny leaves pushing toward the light. Each is an act of composition, an unconscious art that predates us.

In these forms, abstraction is not invention but revelation. The cactus arranges its spines in a geometry of defense and elegance — a living architecture of necessity. The pine cone folds inward and outward, spiraling according to mathematical principles it never studied. The carpet of small green stems interlaces into a quiet complexity, both ordered and wild.

These photographs, also featured in Novisali’s weekly reflection on photography and composition, invite us to notice nature’s way of composing — not by design, but by deep intention. The lens isolates, yet it also listens. Each frame becomes both mirror and metaphor, capturing the tactile truth of the world while revealing its inner abstraction.

Nature as the Original Abstract Artist

Look closely, and every natural form dissolves into geometry and pattern.

The cactus becomes a network of tension; the pine cone, a spiral of coded repetition; the ground cover, a fractal of resilience. Nature is the ultimate abstractionist — it creates through rhythm, proportion, and transformation.

When we paint, photograph, or sculpt these forms, we don’t imitate nature; we extend its language. Every brushstroke, every exposure, every act of noticing becomes a continuation of its endless experiment in form and balance.

This search for the abstract within the natural connects you with a long lineage of Nordic artists who saw nature not merely as subject, but as structure and consciousness.

Hilma af Klint, for instance, translated the geometry of flowers, shells, and spirals into symbolic diagrams of life and spirit. Her work reveals the invisible architecture of growth and energy — a way of painting what the eye cannot see but the soul can sense. Her legacy is also echoed in Hilma and Engla, where the language of art becomes a conversation across time and realms.

In a more contemporary way, Olafur Eliasson continues this dialogue through installations that transform natural phenomena — light, ice, mist, reflection — into immersive experiences of perception. His works remind us that we are not observers of nature but participants in its unfolding abstractions.

Both Hilma and Olafur embody a distinctly Nordic sensitivity to nature — one rooted in light, silence, and transformation — where abstraction becomes a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical.

The 2025 Nobel Prizes — Revealing the Hidden Structures of Life

The 2025 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Medicine offer profound reminders of this same creative logic — that both art and science are acts of seeing the invisible.

In Chemistry, Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi were honored for developing metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) — crystalline architectures capable of capturing gases, filtering water, and creating porous spaces where molecular life unfolds. They design materials that breathe, expanding the boundaries of what structure can mean.

Why These Nobel Prizes Matter

Beyond their technical brilliance, these Nobel Prizes remind us why understanding matters:

They reveal invisible architectures.
MOFs and immune networks make tangible the unseen: the geometry of emptiness, the choreography of balance.
They unite precision and imagination.
Each discovery required the courage to imagine patterns beyond visibility — a union of artistry and logic that drives both invention and art.
They teach balance as survival.
The immune system’s restraint and the molecular framework’s openness echo a universal truth — that resilience is born from equilibrium, not excess.
They reconnect us to the intelligence of nature.
These laureates don’t conquer nature; they listen to it, learning from its patterns and harmonies — much as an artist listens to the rhythm of light and form.
They restore wonder.
In revealing structure within the invisible, they remind us that mystery is not the opposite of knowledge — it is its foundation.

Echoes in Art — From Molecules to Guardians

At the “Animal Guardians” exhibition at ART MUC, these themes take on symbolic form.

The sculptures and paintings there explore the sacred relationship between humanity and the natural world. Each animal form — abstracted, spiritual, protective — mirrors the same underlying geometry of life that science seeks to decode.

Placed in dialogue with your nature photographs and Novisali’s reflections, the exhibition becomes part of a larger composition — a continuum between observation, creation, and connection. Whether through pigment, pattern, or cell, we are always in conversation with the living order that sustains us.

Closing Reflection — The Pulse Beneath All Forms

To observe a cactus spine, a pine cone, or a small weave of leaves is to glimpse the same principles that govern galaxies and immune cells.

Nature’s wisdom lies not in its objects, but in its relationships — the subtle negotiations of tension and release, density and void, action and restraint.

Art and science, when at their best, are not separate languages but two dialects of the same conversation: one emotional, one analytical — both profoundly human.

They remind us that abstraction is not distance from the real, but intimacy with its essence.

To create, to observe, or to understand is to touch the same pulse — the quiet rhythm by which nature abstracts itself into being..

And perhaps the truest question that remains is this: When we look closely enough — through the microscope, the lens, or the soul — do we find nature abstracting itself, or do we find ourselves reflected within it?

References and Further Reading

About Novisali

Novisali, (alias Liselotte Engstam), is besides her roles as professional board member and advisor, a multi-media artist, with a curious, explorative mind and an ambition to learn and extend art experiences to current and new audiences using both traditional and new digital mediums. More information and exhibitions can be found via Novisali.com

This blog post is also shared at the blog of www.liselotteengstam.com, with the artist name Novisali.

The post When Nature Abstracts Itself first appeared on Novisali.

When Quiet Visionaries Speak

Novisali Novisali — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:46:34 +0000

A Conversation Imagined, A Connection Felt

(Läs denna blogpost på svenska HÄR)

As both an artist and someone deeply curious about how we carry and translate meaning across time, I’ve long felt a quiet kinship with women like Engla Hägertz, my fathers aunt, and Hilma af Klint—creators who saw the world not only as it appeared, but as it might become.

This project is an offering. A poetic reconstruction. A meditation on what might have been said, if two visionary women—one with a camera, one with a brush—had found one another across their parallel paths in early 20th-century Sweden.

It is also an invitation to reflect on the unseen threads that connect us across generations, disciplines, and silences. In these imagined letters, I hear echoes of my own creative questions—and perhaps you will too.

— Novisali

Parallel Lives, kindred visions

Engla Hägertz (1890–1974) and Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) lived in the same country during overlapping decades, yet belonged to different spheres of the Swedish art world. One wielded a camera. The other, a brush. Neither sought fame. Both pursued truth.

Engla Hägertz

Engla was a female photographer and studio owner in Oskarström, a small industrial town in Halland, Sweden. Together with her sister Gudrun, she opened her first studio in 1914, capturing portraits of townspeople, laborers, and local families. She also photographed nature—especially flowers—and later created and sold hand-printed botanical postcards. Her work, though often practical, radiated empathy and compositional clarity. She saw light not just as illumination, but as revelation.

Hilma af Klint

Hilma, meanwhile, painted in silence. Her early career followed conventional routes—portraits, landscapes, botanical and scientific illustrations. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (1882–1887), where she was one of the first women admitted. After graduation, she lived and worked primarily in Stockholm, where she built a modest career as a traditional painter.

But in 1906, guided by spiritual experiences and communications she believed came from higher realms, she embarked on a radical new path. She began creating abstract paintings—geometric, symbolic, visionary works that preceded Kandinsky’s by several years. These would later become known as the “Paintings for the Temple,” and marked her turn away from the visible world toward an art of inner revelation. She believed the world wasn’t yet ready to understand them.

Though no evidence suggests they ever met, their lives unfolded in quiet parallel. They were unmarried, independent, deeply spiritual, and creatively driven—women who built careers on their own terms in a time that offered them few models. Both cultivated beauty from the everyday. Both listened for something beyond the visible.

If They Had Met: A Likely Conversation

Imagine Engla reaching out in admiration—perhaps after hearing whispers of Hilma’s strange and beautiful paintings through artist friends in Halmstad or Gothenburg. She might have asked how to stay true to a vision the world didn’t yet understand. Hilma, decades older but similarly solitary, might have written back with gentle encouragement: urging Engla to trust the unseen, to follow the light not just in her subjects, but within herself.

Their letters would not be loud. They would be slow, thoughtful, and quietly transformative—like the way spring sunlight moves across a wooden floor. They would speak of loss and courage, of nature and mystery, of photography as memory and painting as revelation.

And though their mediums differed, their messages would harmonize:

See deeply. Create faithfully. Trust what others cannot yet see.

Letters between Engla Hägertz and Hilma af Klint

Letter 1: March 1914

Engla (24) → Hilma (51)

From Bruksgatan, Oskarström – To Brahegatan, Stockholm

Dear Miss af Klint,

I hope this letter finds you well. I write with humble admiration and genuine curiosity. My name is Engla Hägertz, and my sister and I have just acquired our first photography studio in Oskarström. We are two women, newly in charge of both business and image, filled with ambition but also uncertainty.

I came across mention of your work through a friend in Halmstad, who described it as “otherworldly—like symbols singing in color.” That description has stayed with me.

I wonder if I may ask you something: how does one stay true to an artistic vision when it runs ahead of what the world understands? I feel this already—people want simple portraits. But sometimes, I see something else in them. Something more.

Do you ever feel guided by something unseen? And if so, how do you honor it in your work?

With respect and hope,
Engla Hägertz
Studioägare, Bruksgatan 19, Oskarström

PS. I’ve enclosed a photograph of my sister Gudrun and myself—taken just outside our new studio on Bruksgatan. I thought it might make our letter feel a little less distant, a little more human. I hope you won’t find it presumptuous; it simply felt right to share an image, since that is the language I speak best.

We both admire your work greatly, even if we are just beginning to understand it. Perhaps one day, we will have the chance to meet—not just through letters or photographs, but in person, spirit to spirit.

Warmest regards once more,

Engla

Letter 2: July 1914

Hilma (51) → Engla (24)
From Munsö, Stockholm – to Bruksgatan, Oskarström

Dear Miss Hägertz,

Your letter reached me with the gentleness of someone attuned to more than just surface. Thank you for writing.

You ask how to stay true to a vision ahead of its time. I have asked myself the same. For years, I painted portraits, flowers, even scientific illustrations—works that others understood. But in 1906, something shifted. I began to receive messages. Not from the outer world, but from within. I was asked to paint the unseen.

Many do not understand what I do now. But I believe we are not alone in our creating. We are collaborators with something greater.

Keep seeing what others miss, Miss Hägertz. The world may catch up, but your vision must lead.

Warmly,
Hilma af Klint

P.S. I’ve enclosed a small photograph of myself in my studio, alongside a preparatory sketch I made years ago. It later became part of a larger painting I titled Old Age, part of a series exploring the cycle of life—not as decline, but as transformation.

I share it not for judgment, but in the spirit of artistic kinship. Perhaps you will see in it something I did not intend—some echo or energy that speaks to you. I wonder: how do you read images that reach beyond clarity?

I would be most curious to hear your thoughts, not as a critic, but as a fellow seer of the in-between.

With kind regard once again,

Hilma

Letter 3: September 1915

Engla (26) → Hilma (53)
From Bruksgatan, Oskarström – To Ynglingagatan, Stockholm

Dear Hilma,

Thank you for your words. They offered strength in a year full of trial. My sister Gudrun and I are still learning the rhythms of running a studio—booking sittings, managing chemicals, chasing light. Yet more than that, I’m learning to listen.

You wrote that you were asked to paint the unseen. I feel I am learning to photograph it. A man came in with tired eyes and a soot-darkened face. When the image emerged, there was tenderness the world never saw in him. The lens, I believe, listens to light’s memory.

You said we are collaborators with something greater. Perhaps so. And perhaps that is the artist’s true commission.

With warmth and thanks,
Engla

P.S. I’ve enclosed two photographs that I hope you’ll receive with interest. The first is from within our studio—a quiet moment between sittings, where light poured in just right across the backdrop and caught Gudrun adjusting the camera. I often find the in-between moments are the most revealing.

The second is from a recent visit to Arild, where we combined work and rest. The coastal landscape there felt more alive than any backdrop we could construct. The sea, the wind, the way the grasses lean—it all seemed to whisper something ancient. I felt more like a listener than a photographer.

I wonder—do you also find that nature speaks differently depending on where you are? And do you think the unseen you paint is sometimes nestled in the curve of a hill, or the hush of a tree?

Curious to hear what you see.

Warmly,

Engla

Letter 4: April 1917

Engla (27) → Hilma (54)
From Bruksgatan, Oskarström – To Ynglingagatan, Stockholm

Dear Hilma,

I write with a heavy heart. My sister Gudrun has passed. She fought bravely, but the illness overtook her this spring.

The studio feels hollow without her presence—her quiet hands, her strong laugh, her way of framing a shot before I even saw it. She was not only my sister but my co-creator. I wonder if you’ve ever felt a creative bond like that, one so woven into daily life that its absence feels like light missing from the room.

Still, I develop the prints we began together. I press flowers into books like we used to. I try to listen for her in the silence.

With grief and love,
Engla

P.S. I’ve enclosed a photograph of myself standing on the doorstep of our studio. It was taken by a kind neighbor who sensed, I think, the pause in me. Some days I hesitate there—hand on the doorframe, heart holding its breath—half expecting to hear Gudrun’s voice from inside. For a moment, I still believe she might be there, adjusting the curtain, laughing at the sunlight catching the lens.

Do you know that feeling, Hilma? When absence doesn’t feel like an emptiness, but like a presence you cannot quite enter?

The studio remains filled with her touch, but I walk through it differently now. Quieter. Slower. More aware of everything we built together.

I share this image not as a portrait, but as a question. What do you see in it?

With a full and aching heart,

Engla

Letter 5: October 1917

Hilma (55) → Engla (28)
Från Ynglingagatan, Stockholm – Till Bruksgatan, Oskarström

Dearest Engla,

I am deeply sorry to hear about Gudrun. Such losses shape us, even as they try to undo us. In my own life, grief has often opened the doorway to deeper seeing.

I’ve just returned from Dornach, where Steiner’s vision is taking shape in the Goetheanum. I have also been exploring aand writing on Studies of the Life of the Soul. The building curves like thought itself. I believe architecture, painting, even photography can become temples of becoming.

In your portraits, you reveal the sacred in the ordinary. That is no small feat. That is alchemy.

Hold close what calls to you.

With care,
Hilma

P.S. I’ve enclosed a small drawing—made during one of our recent séances. It came quickly, almost without thought, as if passed through me rather than from me. It is not a composition in the usual sense, but a trace—a symbol I do not yet fully understand.

I share it with you not as finished work, but as a gesture. A language of lines born in stillness. Perhaps it speaks more clearly to you than it does to me.

You mentioned listening for Gudrun in the silence. I wonder if what we call silence is sometimes where the truest presence lives. I do believe that in certain states—dream, grief, prayer, light through trees—we become more attuned to what moves beneath.

Let me know what you see, if you feel called.

With gentleness across distance,

Hilma

Letter 6: Spring 1919

Engla (30) → Hilma (56)
Från Bruksgatan, Oskarström – Till Munsö, Stockholm

Dear Hilma,

This spring has been both return and rebirth. I recovered from the fever that swept through last year and have resumed our studio. It feels different now—quieter, maybe deeper.

Your letters helped me through. The thought that my work, too, might be a temple—this stayed with me. I now photograph not only people but their gestures, their absences. What is not said has become just as present.

Thank you for showing me that form can hold silence.

With gratitude,
Engla

P.S. Lately, I’ve taken to bringing small bursts of color into my surroundings—painting the garden chairs sky blue, the table legs a hopeful green. It’s as if, after so much grey, I need the world to speak in brighter tones again. Even the simplest things—a tin watering can, a cushion on the step—have become little altars of intention.

I’ve also done something I never imagined: I bought myself a car and have started learning to drive. There’s something freeing about being behind the wheel, wind in my hair, with no one expecting where I’ll go next. I’ve been visiting coastal towns with my camera, following nothing but light and feeling.

I’ve included a photograph of my mother, Josefina, standing on the beach at Tylösand. She looks out over the water with a kind of quiet courage. I often think of her resilience—and now I see I carry it, too.

I wonder—have you ever felt the need to color the world around you before returning to your canvas?

With spring’s unfolding,

Engla

Letter 7: Summer 1920

Hilma (58) → Engla (31)
Från Munsö, Stockholm till Bruksgatan, Oskarström

Dear Engla,

It delights me to hear you’ve taken to the roads in your own car! A woman with wheels is a marvel of our time. I, too, have wandered—to Mölle, to Dornach again. Travel shifts perception. So does illness. So does spirit.

I’m now painting trees—both real and imagined. I see you are photographing by the sea? The sea is another kind of spiral. May your images hold the rhythm of waves.

Yours in quiet motion,

Hilma

P.S. I’ve enclosed a page from my sketchbook—a study of blue violets I made while walking near Dornach. I’ve started calling it The Blue Swedes in my mind, perhaps because the colors reminded me of the way home feels in memory: tender, quiet, rooted.

The form came to me like a whisper—part flower, part symbol. I’m not certain what it means yet, but I feel it’s a link between body and spirit, soil and sky.

Do you ever name your photographs after feelings rather than places? Or after the people they remind you of?

I thought of you as I painted this. Perhaps it’s the rhythm of your seaside journeys that stirred the color in me. Let me know what you see in it—your eye often reveals what mine misses.

With traveling thoughts,

Hilma

Letter 8: August 1925

Engla (35) → Hilma (63)
From Bruksgatan, Oskarström – to Munsö, Stockholm

Dear Hilma,

I’ve been photographing reflections lately—people in mirrors, flowers caught in glass, faces in puddles. Something in your spiral paintings must have inspired this. They seem to say: the center is always elsewhere.

Sometimes I wonder, do we both use our crafts not to document but to translate? I think so.

With admiration,
Engla

P.S. I’ve enclosed a photograph that feel like small riddle.

It showm my sister Hevig an dmyself. It shows me twice—once directly, and once in reflection. A mirror stood angled just so in the corner of our sitting room, catching more of me than I intended. Yet there’s something truthful in it. The seen and the seen-again. The self and the echo. I wonder if your spirals also carry that doubling—a movement toward something not yet fully revealed.

Do you ever find that your brush captures questions rather than answers?

With curiosity and affection,

Engla

Letter 9: January 1938

Hilma (76) → Engla (48)
From Grönegatan, Lund – to Bruksgatan, Oskarström

Dear Engla,

In Järna the trees are frozen but glowing. I’ve taken to sketching them again. Roots like prayers. I’ve also been dreaming of a round temple filled with paintings—not to display art, but to awaken something in the visitor.

You once asked if our work remembers. I say yes. It remembers what we forgot. What the world hurried past.

Yours in devotion,
Hilma

P.S. I’ve enclosed three small offerings that I hope will speak to you in different ways.

The first is a painting I made in Dornach in 1930—an earlier study of trees. Their branches reach upward like questions, while the roots, invisible at first, form a quiet geometry of trust beneath the surface. I was thinking of how growth is both ascent and descent—how spirit and soil speak to each other if we let them.

The second is a photograph of my place in Järna, taken on a frost-bright morning. The light was still and translucent, and I felt it carried something sacred—as if the house itself was listening.

The third is a new sketch for what I now call The Temple Within. It is not a building as much as an intention—a place where images do not instruct, but resonate. The shape came to me in meditation: circular, unfolding, womb-like. Each wall would carry a cycle of paintings, each passage offering stillness.

Let me know what you feel in these fragments. You, with your gift for reading light, may see something I have only begun to sense.

With quiet hope,

Hilma

Letter 10: December 1939

Engla (49) → Hilma (77)
From Bruksgatan, Oskarström – to Hamngatan 5, Djursholm

Dear Hilma,

The world teeters again on the edge of war. I find myself returning to small things—hyacinths in the window, shadows on frost.

I think of you often. You tucked your work away, saying the world wasn’t ready. Was it trust or doubt that guided you? I hope it was trust. I try to trust too.

With quiet courage,
Engla

P.S. I’ve enclosed a few photographs that have become anchors for me in these uncertain days—fragments of light I’ve tried to hold onto.

The first is a quiet portrait of myself with flowers on the table. Behind me on the wall hangs a photograph of my beloved Gudrun. It was taken years ago, but I find that her gaze still steadies me. Some days, it feels like we’re still working side by side.

Another shows me arranging flowers—some placed gently as a tablecloth embroidered by hand, others tucked on a lamp that casts golden light in the early evenings. These small gestures—flowers, linens, light—feel like ways of saying: We are still here. We still create beauty.

And finally, a larger photograph of my family: sisters, brothers, their husbands, wives, and children gathered in laughter and layered conversation. I look at it often now. In the face of what looms, it reminds me of what binds.

I share these with you not only as memory, but as testament—that even as the world edges toward shadow, we keep shaping light.

With tenderness across the distance,

Engla

Letter 11: September 1944

Hilma (82) → Engla (54)
From Hamngatan 5, Djursholm – To Bruksgatan, Oskarström

Beloved Engla,

I sense this is my final letter. My hands shake now, but the light is still within me. I have prepared the archive. Erik will guard it. Not yet understood, but not lost.

When you press the shutter, do you feel you are making something for a future eye? I always did.

You helped me feel less alone in this. Thank you.

In light,
Hilma

Ps. Adding my sketch of Pinus Silvestrus: Pinus sylvestris is a manifestation of the search for truth; it ascends to the heights and tells us: “try to reach the light, try to overcome what holds you back.” That obstacle is our disinterest in searching for the source of life; instead, we have an innate desire to create ourselves following our own rules. There is no possibility to create, for man draws from a common source the life skills that in part lie concealed, in part are revealed in the world of forms. In order to be able to come up with new forms we would have to understand what has already been created.

Afterword: A Dialogue Across Light and Time

The letters you have just read are fictional—but the lives, the art, and the questions they contain are very real.

Engla Hägertz, the quiet observer with a camera in her hands, left behind over 25,000 photographs. Her images of working families, children, flowers, and local life were never part of a major gallery show—but they became cherished reflections of a region and an era. She documented the beauty in the ordinary and made space for feeling in the formal.

Hilma af Klint, the painter who listened to inner voices, created more than a thousand visionary works—swirling with color, geometry, spirit, and symbolism. Her paintings, kept hidden for decades, are now recognized as foundational to abstract art. She imagined her works displayed in a temple not yet built—a future gallery of awakening.

by Novisali

Though these women never met, this exchange reimagines what might have occurred if their worlds had touched. Their imagined letters are a celebration of parallel courage:

– The courage to create without applause.
– The courage to trust invisible truths.
– The courage to leave behind a trace for others to follow.

In reading their words, we are reminded that some of the most important artistic conversations happen in quiet—between light and shadow, spirit and surface, brushstroke and shutter.

Their legacy is not only in what they created, but in what they make possible for us to see today.

Perhaps you, too, are listening to something others cannot yet hear.

If so—may these letters be your encouragement to continue.

Learn more

More about Engla Hägetz (google translated website) EnglaHagertz.se

Details about Engla from genealogy

More about Hilma af Klint (wikipedia) About Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint Foundation

Hilma af Klint exhibition 2025 at Museum of Modern Art in New York

The newly authored book about an imaginary time of Hilma af Klints life, The invisible temple – a vision about Hilma af klint (in Swedish) by Ida There´n.

About Novisali

This blog post was is also shared at the blog of www.liselotteengstam.com, with the artist name Novisali.

The post When Quiet Visionaries Speak first appeared on Novisali.

A Herbarium of Time

Novisali Novisali — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:52:51 +0000

– a story of pressed petals, quiet revolutions, and Earth’s living memory.

(the blogpost in Swedish HERE)

Long before we could photograph a flower with a phone or model a forest from a satellite, we pressed its petals between pages.

We flattened beauty to remember it. And from that act — tender, deliberate — a quiet revolution in how we see the natural world began.

Ancient Roots: The Sacred Origins of Pressed Plants

Based on the Artworks in the exhibition Herbarium of Time by Novisali

Yet the story didn’t start in a European cabinet, or a Victorian parlor.
It began even deeper — in the warm breath of the desert, in the hands of the ancient ones.

In Egypt, over three thousand years ago, people dried flowers not just for beauty, but for eternity.

from Tutanchamons burial site

In the tomb of Tutankhamun, garlands of olive leaves, blue lotus, and cornflowers were found — perfectly preserved offerings to accompany the boy-king into the afterlife.

They believed that flowers held power: to honor, to heal, to guide the soul beyond.

The lotus, rising pure from muddy waters, became a symbol of rebirth.
Rose petals were laid beside the dead in acts of remembrance.

from the Ebers Papyrus

And scrolls like the Ebers Papyrus, one of humanity’s oldest medical texts, recorded the healing uses of over 700 plants.

They dried them, sorted them, used them with intention.
It was not called an herbarium — but it was a living archive, rooted in reverence.

Centuries passed.

The Garden of Stillness: Science, Discovery, and Classification

Painting of Luca Ghini (1490-1566)

In Renaissance Italy, Luca Ghini began pressing plants flat, fixing them onto paper not to embalm the soul, but to illuminate the species.
He called it a hortus siccus — a dry garden.

He taught students to press leaves and flowers, not merely to heal, but to study, to compare, to learn from nature as it truly was, not only as the ancients described it. Not to heal the body, as the Egyptians had done, but to heal ignorance — to classify, to understand, to name. And so, the world’s first botanical archive was born — not a garden of growth, but a garden of stillness.

From Ghini’s dry garden, a new chapter began — humanity started building a library of life.
From there, the pressed garden bloomed across continents.
Explorers gathered flora like trophies.
Colonists pressed petals alongside their claims of land.

Scholars stored petals from Persia, petals from Peru.
In Kew and Calcutta, in Uppsala and beyond, cabinets filled with green whispers from every edge of Earth.
Not bound by season or soil, a herbarium could hold a mountain meadow in winter, or a jungle flower long gone to seed. It could let a Swedish botanist compare with a Brazilian one, a 21st-century student with a 16th-century explorer. Pressed between sheets lay the shared language of leaf and root.

“If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too.”
— Carl Linnaeus

At the same time as Linnaeus ordered the language of plants in his system, a new way of seeing nature spread across Europe.

In Stockholm, brothers Bengt and Peter Jonas Bergius continued the work, letting their home along Karlbergsvägen blossom into a botanical garden. Their herbarium and garden were later donated to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and became the foundation of what is today the Bergius Botanic Garden. In the 19th century, the garden was moved to the shores of Brunnsviken, where the memory of their work followed. It remains there still, a living archive of nature’s stillness and transformation.

Exploration of the global movment of botanical specimens

Such herbaria, whether born in Italy, in Linnaeus’ system, or in the Bergius brothers’ garden, were more than specimens. They were time travelers.
Each page told a story.

A flower from a colonial voyage — hopeful, or haunting.
A weed found by a child in a forgotten field.
A tree leaf gathered just before the forest was cleared.
A violet pressed by Emily Dickinson, inked with silence and verse.
A tomato from 1540s Italy — now extinct — whose DNA still whispers recipes for the future.

And with time, the herbarium expanded. Across Europe, explorers brought home the flora of distant lands, dried under foreign suns. In drawing rooms and university halls, pressed plants became symbols of curiosity, conquest, love, loss.
And alongside the science, art blossomed.

Art and Spirit: Flowers as Language and Revelation

Example of Japanse Kacho-ga art

From early Persian manuscripts and Japanese Kacho-ga scrolls, to the intricate works of 18th-century artists like Maria Sibylla Merian and Mary Delany, botanical illustration became more than visual record—it became a devotional act.

To paint a flower in its precise, unfolding detail was to bear witness to the sacred geometry of life. Artists learned not only to see, but to revere. In Victorian parlors, the act of pressing, drawing, or arranging a plant was often imbued with spiritual meaning—connecting human fragility with nature’s cycles of decay and renewal.

In the Romantic era, plants became conduits for inner states: violets for humility, lilies for purity, mosses for memory.

Example of language of flowers

The language of flowers (floriography) encoded emotion and ritual, while esoteric thinkers in the Theosophical and Anthroposophical movements saw botanical forms as reflections of universal order, even cosmic consciousness.

Herbarium of Time V. from the Flower Chapter

Botanical art was never just about accuracy—it was a way of listening.

A practice of stillness.
A meditation in pigment.
A communion with the invisible.

Amateurs and aristocrats alike assembled albums. Girls at finishing schools pressed primroses and labeled them in Latin. Botanists argued over names and lineage. Artists arranged specimens like mandalas. Linnaeus rearranged the world with his unbound pages, letting classification become conversation.

“I have shown, that there is a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.” — Hilma af Klint

A herbarium was a place of order amid wildness, of learning forged in the stillness of decay.

And as centuries passed, we kept pressing.
We pressed in hope, in science, in grief.

Green Echoes: Herbaria as Time Travelers

Across shelves and drawers in museums and universities around the world, over 390 million plant specimens rest in stillness — mosses and magnolias, algae and acorns, extinct orchids and seeds of tomorrow’s medicine. But these aren’t just scientific collections. They are living archives of memory, climate, and care.

Today, herbaria are being reopened with new eyes.
– Scientists read leaves for signs of rising carbon and early blooming.
– Soil stuck to roots tells stories of lost forests.
– Ancient DNA offers clues for breeding drought-resistant crops.

These pressed petals, once gathered in silence, are now speaking to the future.

In labs, they are scanned and sequenced.
In classrooms, children press flowers with glue and wonder.
In galleries, they hang like green elegies to lost ecologies.

by Dutch Sculpture Artist Tomáš Libertíny, exploring the relationship between nature and technology..

A herbarium is both a witness and a mirror.
It reflects our migrations, medicines, myths — and what we value enough to preserve.
In a single sheet, one can trace climate, culture, longing, and loss.

Each dried stem says: “I was here. I mattered.”
And still, we press on.

Several Herbarium (incl one owned by Novisali) and a botanical press.

We press not just flowers — but stories. Moments. Warnings.
A weed gathered today may one day help someone understand the year everything changed.

Perhaps a future botanist will trace its veins.
A child will whisper: “So this is what it looked like.”
A scientist will find a missing cure.
An artist will ink poetry into the space between its petals.

A herbarium is not a graveyard —
It is a green echo.
A bridge between the ephemeral and the eternal.
A promise made with the Earth:
To see. To learn. To remember.t only knowledge,
But wonder.

Reimagining the Herbarium: Memory in the Digital Age

Today, the spirit of the herbarium continues to evolve — not only in drawers and folders, but through data, code, and imagination.

Projects like the Large Nature Model, an AI-powered encyclopedia of life, echo the ambition of centuries of plant collection: to understand, to remember, to care.

Artists like Refik Anadol transform ecological data into dynamic, dreamlike landscapes — letting forests, winds, and microbial rhythms speak through light and motion. Mini-documentaries like Biome Lumina and platforms such as the Dataland Museum invite us to step into immersive narratives where nature is no longer just observed — but felt, interpreted, and reimagined.

These are the new herbaria — built with sensors instead of scissors, shaped by algorithms, not atlases.

“If machines can dream, let them dream of Earth.”
— Refik Anadol, on his Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams project

But their aim remains the same:

To preserve wonder. To tell the story of life.

Explore related Virtual Art Exhibition: A Herbarium of Time

-an Art Exhibition of Memory, Knowledge, and Wonder

The Herbarium of Time by Novisali is a poetic virtual art exhibition exploring the centuries-old practice of pressing plants — not just as a botanical art, but as an act of memory, care, and cultural preservation.

From ancient garlands to digital archives, these fragile specimens speak across time: healing, naming, mourning, and remembering. Each pressed petal becomes a green time traveler, holding echoes of climate, culture, and curiosity.

More than an archive, this is a mirror of now and a whisper to the future — inviting us to slow down, press, and preserve what truly matters.

Memory in chlorophyll. Stillness as knowledge. Wonder, pressed into eternity.

Explore the Virtual Art Exhibition A Herbarium of Time:

To the Art Exhibition Herbarium of Time

The Art exhibition Herbarium of Time is divided into seven chapters explained further below.

Explore the virtual exhibition with the support of our AI powered Art Reflection Guide

Experience the exhibition with the Novisali Art Guide as your guide. Gain deeper insights into the themes and uncover personal reflections as you engage with the artwork.

Access Instructions and Reflection Guide

The Art exhibition Herbarium of Time’s seven chapters:

Chapter 1 – Origins: The First Press | The Flowers
“Before the microscope, there was a page, and on that page, a pressed petal of wonder.” Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time I – V

Chapter 2 – Expansion: Pressed Across Continents | The Botanical Maps
“Petals pressed between pages carried continents home.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time VI – XII

Chapter 3 – Memory: The Gentle Archivist | The Violets
“Every girl had her flowers; every flower, her unspoken verse.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time XXVI – XXXI

Chapter 4 – Witness: The Archive Speaks | The Archive Split
“Pressed in stillness, they speak of change.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time XXXII – XXXV

Chapter 5 – Extinction: Ghost Gardens | The Ashes
“Some gardens no longer grow — but their shadows remain, pressed in time.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time XXI – XXV

Chapter 6 – Reimagination: Renaissance Gardens | The Digital Petals
“We can press with pixels — and still we remember.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time XIII – XX

Chapter 7 – Future: The Living Archive | The Glitter
“Each page we press is a seed for someone else to find.”
Shows the artworks Herbarium in Time XXXVI – XLV

References:

Ebers Papyrus Medical Text
For Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, Life Was a Banquet, But the Afterlife Was the Greatest Feast of All
Shroud and Flower Garlands on Upper Part of Tutankhamun’s Second Coffin

About Luca Ghini
Herbarium History
Herbarium History and Modern Uses
Botanical Links to future

Kew Herbarium – one of the world larges botanical archives
Global Scale of Herbaria from Herbarium curators

Global meta-analysis shows that threatened flowering plants have higher pollination deficits
Leaf fossil reveals an ancient green highway across India

About Carl Linneus from Uppsala University
Linnean Online at the Linnean Society
About Bergianska (Bergius) Botanical Garden
About the origin of Bergius Garden and the Bergius brothers (apprentecies to Linne) (in Swedish)

On the colonial legacy of botanical collections
A time machine for Botanists from University of Gothenburg
Swedens virtual Herbarium
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Global Plants
Smithsonian US Botany Collection

The history of Botanical Art and Illustration
Japanese Kachiga poetry and art
Language of flowers
“To Grow to Greenness and Renown”: Female Botanists and Botanical Illustrators from Tulane University
Botanical Illustrations by Elizabeth Haig

Hilma Af Klint What Stands Behind the Flowers, Exhibition at MOMA
About Swedish Artist Hilma af Klint
Hilmas interst in spiritual beliefs and theosphy by Guggenheim Museum
Theosophy
Anthroposophy
Theospohy and visual arts
Theospohy and arts
Theosophyart

Humanistic Uses of Herbaria

The Living Encyclopedia: Large Nature Model
About Dataland Museum
Minidocumentary Biome Lumina

Herbaria by Debora Hirsh at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary

About Novisali

This blog post was is also shared at the blog of www.liselotteengstam.com, with the artist name Novisali.

The post A Herbarium of Time first appeared on Novisali.