Home >  Lifestyle >  Gardening

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

By Douglass Oster, Post-Gazette Garden Columnist

Botanical artist Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, living in the wilds of New York City, had to resort to extraordinary measures to keep her subject matter fresh: She kept her flowers in water in her bathtub.

Artist Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden painted "#9 Red Prairie Sunflower" after her neighbor, well-known geneticist Theodore D. A. Cockerell and his wife, produced it from a wild mutant. The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is located on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University on Frew Street. The gallery is on the fifth floor of the Hunt Library. Hours are 9 a.m. to noon Mondays through Fridays and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays, closed on Saturdays. Listen to a radio version of this story at 7 p.m. tomorrow on WYEP-FM (91.3).

The flowers in the bathtub is just one of the many vignettes that James White, curator of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, and assistant curator Lugene Bruno uncovered as they assembled a retrospective of Dowden's work and life titled "A Blossom on the Bough."

The show is in celebration of the 95th birthday of someone White calls "one of, if not the, country's leading botanical artists."

The show chronicles Dowden's life from her earliest drawings of a pansy at age 6 through her most current and perhaps last book, 1994's "Poisons in our Path." Altogether, she wrote and illustrated 11 books, the first published in 1961.

Dowden's childhood was spent in the shadow of the Rockies in Boulder, Colo., where she collected and drew anything she could -- although insects were her favorite subject.

She attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to study painting and illustration. After graduation in 1930, she worked as a teacher and muralist and also designed wallpapers and drapery fabrics.

During her summer breaks from teaching, she painted, and when she sold some works to Life magazine in the 1950s, she gave up her other interests to focus on her art.

Dowden insisted on drawing from nature and had flowers and plants sent to her studio from all over the country. She also spent time in the garden observing and recording. She had a particular interest in pollination. One detailed work shows a honey bee's back covered with a dusting of yellow pollen as it digs its face deep into the throat of a purple sage blossom.

White and Bruno visited Dowden in Boulder in 1998. The artist gave them the bulk of her life's work and papers.

How did she feel about handing over her legacy? "I think she was relieved," White said. "She's glad to know that the work is going to where it will be used and appreciated, so we've really taken a great burden off of her."

The next step was to carefully research what was in hand and determine the best way to present the artist's work.

"We had so much rich information from what she had given us," Bruno explains, "that we both felt we wanted to flesh out Anne Ophelia as a person. Being able to use her correspondence was just such a gift."

The beauty and detail of the art is spectacular, but what takes the show to another level are the excerpts from letters written by Dowden about her work. To read the artist's description of how she searched for a certain plant or struggled with the temporary nature of the rose enlightens us.

They also give insight to the importance of early influences. In a letter written to White in 1983, for example, she cited the significance of her painting "#9 Red Prairie Sunflower." "That plant played a big part in my life. All the horticultural varieties were originated by my neighbors and mentors, the T.D.A. Cockerells. Mrs. C. discovered the sport in the vacant lot opposite her house, took it into custody, and went on to cross it in such a way as to perpetuate its characteristics. I learned the principle of heredity from red sunflowers rather than from Mendel's peas."

"She is a jewel," said White, "a gem, a blossom; she's a treasure, she's a national treasure."