Book Review: Nature Stilled
If you admire the pattern and iridescence of a dragonfly wing, or the symmetry of a pine cone, you will probably enjoy perusing ‘Nature Stilled’. Jane Ussher’s book was published this year (2020) by Te Papa Press. It has 157 plates of beautiful natural specimens from Te Papa Tongarewa - New Zealand’s national museum.
Land snails, from the Phillipines.
The bulk of the book is devoted to photographs, each with a small amount of accompanying text that names what is shown, with a sentence or two about it. Unusually, the plates are arranged primarily by colour, which makes for a pleasing mix of subjects.
Collection of South Island rifleman.
The photographs include single specimens, collections of the same or related species, close-ups and even X-ray plates. One of the pages is a watercolour painting of several red seaweeds, painted by Nancy Adams. Also intriguing are the fish that have been ‘cleaned and stained’ in a way that makes the flesh translucent, while the bones and cartilage are stained 2 different colours to highlight their structure.
Smelt, that has been cleaned and stained.
The coverage of species is eclectic; but choosing what to include must have been exceedingly difficult. The species featured range from the common to the extinct, from NZ natives to species from the tropics and the poles. There is even a collection of beetles, made in 1915-16, during the Gallipoli campaign.
Sea lilies - Gymnocrinus richeri.
Some methods of storage are shown - a box of rocks from Antarctica with lichens attached, microscope slides, jars of specimens, mounting pins, hand made display albums and specimen packets made from newspapers.
There are additional remarks related to each photo, written by specialists, after the main body of plates. It might have been more convenient to include this detail with each plate, but presumably this was an aesthetic choice. An index would have made matching the plates to the related detail easier.
The cover of ‘Nature Stilled’.
This really is a beautiful book. The photographs of these specimens, now “forever silent and still”, highlights the fascinating and beautiful natural world that we inhabit.
You can see further excerpts from the book here.