I’m the daughter of an English teacher, so it’s probably no surprise that I have always loved to read. Some of my favorite memories of growing up are related to books—going to the cool sanctuary of the public library on a hot summer day; the pleasure of reading my way through a long series like Nancy Drew; borrowing a book so many times from my fourth-grade teacher that eventually she gave it to me. I loved fiction for the way it could transport me to another world, and I loved nonfiction for the way it taught me about the world I lived in.
A few nonfiction books in particular stand out in my mind as ones that led me down a path to becoming a nature-focused artist. The first is Ruth Heller’s The Reason for a Flower, a beautifully illustrated book about plants and pollination. Heller created her illustrations in colored pencil, a medium which my 10-year-old self had actually used, and so her artwork seemed accessible to me in a way that paintings didn’t. On top of that, she lived near where I lived at the time, in California’s East Bay Area, and she came to my school for a visit. I don’t remember much about the visit, other than realizing that an actual person had written and illustrated those books, and that “writer/illustrator” was a job that a person could have. The Reason for a Flower is so deeply ingrained in my memory that I use a passage from it as a mnemonic device to remember parts of flowers:
From an anther on a stamen to a stigma on a style/Pollen grains must travel and stay a little while…
How gorgeous is this page?
The inside front cover of Reader’s Digest Guide to North American Wildlife, published in 1982. I read this book cover to cover and was obsessed with this illustration.
The second book that captured my imagination is The Reader’s Digest Guide to North American Wildlife. Around the time that I learned about Ruth Heller’s books, I visited my great-great-aunt Alice with my mom and brothers. My brothers and I wandered around her home, which was full of wonderful things like geodes and feathers and books. Each of us left with a couple little gifts from this collection—mine were a marbled, heart-shaped paperweight, and a field guide called The Reader’s Digest Guide to North American Wildlife. I took this book home and read it cover to cover, even the boring bits. I checked off the animals and plants from my area, wanting to know the names of all the things I saw around my home. And I mooned over the illustrations, thinking to myself that someday I would learn how to draw and paint animals realistically someday.
The Forgotten Pollinators is full of beautiful black-and-white illustrations by illustrator Paul Mirocha.
Years later, I did learn to illustrate animals and plants realistically, when I was accepted into the graduate science illustration program at UC Santa Cruz (now at CSU Monterey Bay). It’s also when I was introduced to a third book that captured my interest: The Forgotten Pollinators, written by Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, and illustrated by Paul Mirocha. My classmate Erika Beyer suggested I read this book after we’d visited the South African and Australian gardens at the UCSC Arboretum, knowing that I was curious about what pollinated proteas and bottlebrushes on their native continents. I was hooked from the first pages—learning about all the weird and wonderful ways that plants trick animals into pollinating them, and the poignant relationships between certain species of plants and animals that rely solely on one another. Reading about commercial honeybee and bumblebee pollination gave me a new appreciation for bees—especially in my home state of California, where fruit and vegetable growers are dependent on these hardworking little critters. The stories in The Forgotten Pollinators directly inspired several pieces of artwork, and I reread it every few years and always come away with a renewed passion for pollination.
Of course, there are so many other books that have opened my mind and taught me about the world around me, and there are so many more I have yet to read. (There is a foot-high stack of unread books on my nightstand, with subject matter ranging from nature writing to moss to backyard birding.) I’m forever buying books in natural history museums and botanical gardens and receiving books from friends and family. I love the idea that I’ll never run out of books to read. And I’m always chasing that feeling of walking out of great-great-aunt Alice’s house with a book under my arm and a marble paperweight in my pocket, ready to learn something new.
