Member Events
Director's Discovery Series
Acting Director, National Museum of Natural History Invites you and a guest to the Museum
For the Director’s Discovery Series on
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Light refreshments will be served.
Museum is located at Constitution Avenue at 10th St. N.W.
Parking available in Museum lot.
R.S.V.P. to Lorraine Maughlin (202) 633-0824 or MaughlinL@si.edu
Botanica Magnifica & Audubon’s Birds of America
Be among the first to view Botanica Magnifica. The images capture the essence of plant form, color, and texture and the complexity of the botanical world. Two volumes focus on the Smithsonian’s living plant collections, which include many that are threatened with extinction in their native habitats.
- Hedychium longicornutum Griff. ex Baker, a ginger collected by Smithsonian botanists in Southeast Asia. From Botanica Magnifica, a five-volume folio of photographic art by photographer Jonathan M. Singer and botanical curators John Kress and Marc Hachadourian.
- © Snowy Heron: Drawn from Nature by J. J. Audubon
Also share a rare opportunity to see John James Audubon’s Birds of America, held in the Smithsonian Libraries. Published in Edinburgh and London from 1827 to 1838, it consists of 435 hand-colored aquatint engravings of birds, all life-sized. The work is perhaps the most valuable book in existence today.
Did you know?
John James Audubon was employed as a taxidermist, portrait painter, and drawing teacher.
Did you know?
The flora of the Washington-Baltimore Area includes a total of almost 2800 species.
Did you know?
The Museum has the largest living collection of plants in the families Zingiberaceae (Ginger) and Commelinaceae (Spiderwort) under glass in the world.
Speaker
W. John Kress, Ph.D., has been a Research Scientist and Curator of Botany in the National Museum of Natural History since 1988. Following his training at Harvard and Duke Universities in tropical botany, ethnobotany, and ecology, he has devoted his professional career to the documentation of plant diversity in tropical regions of the world and to research on the processes of evolution. He is especially interested in the interactions between plants and animals and how they evolved together. Recently he is working with botanical artists to further the interaction between art and science. Dr. Kress is the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation as well as an Adjunct Professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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