EXHIBITION
BOTANICA HAS LONG BEEN THE JEWEL IN THE GARDENS’ EXHIBITION CROWN, BUT EVENTS HAVE CONSPIRED TO ENSURE THIS YEAR’S SHOW WILL BE SOMETHING SPECIAL. ROBBIE MACINTOSH AND SUE WANNAN REPORT
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s a respected and renowned celebration of world-standard botanical art, Botanica is used to commanding centre stage, but this year it is – for the first time – sharing the limelight with a collection of equally striking portraits of the mysterious, complex, often-underground world of fungi. Fungi X Botanica (24 April–9 May) combines the 21st Botanica, always planned for this year, and Fungi, an exposition originally scheduled for last year but postponed in the uncertainty that marked 2020. Botanica sets a high benchmark in the botanical art world. Many of the artists have international reputations – reputations that sometimes germinated in those early Botanica exhibitions. And Foundation & Friends has played a significant role in the recognition of excellence in this genre. Favourites such as Beverly Allen, Angela Lober, Elaine Musgrave and Susannah Blaxill will again be part of this year’s exhibition. One startling image, by Leonie Norton, another Botanica favourite,
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is the aptly named Amorphophallus titanum. That’s the plant that produces a flower up to three metres tall that smells like rotting meat and is often called the corpse flower. Not only is the flower astonishing, but so is the corm that produces it – typically weighing about 50 kilograms (although the current world record holder is a plant at Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh that weighs 153.9kg). Several of Botanica’s best-known artists have chosen to depict fungi this year, giving them a foot in both camps. Gymnopilus junonius by Beverly Allen
Beverly Allen has done fungi on vellum, as has John Pastoriza-Piñol, whose painting of Morchella elata (one of the edible black morels) will make mushroom hunters salivate. John once said that his work exists “in a realm somewhere between the hyper-real and literal, and the surreal and fantastical”, which pretty much describes the amazing, and littleknown, biosphere of fungi. The world of fungi and mycelium is a scientific wonder; something we are only starting to understand. Mycelium is the earth’s underground natural internet, mushrooms in all their forms being the resulting fruiting bodies of this nearly invisible world. Reach down and move a log and you will see a vast array of fuzzy cobweb-like cells – that’s mycelium, the network of fungal cells that permeates all landscapes. When you pick a mushroom (only about 10% of fungi produce mushrooms) you stand on a vast network of fungal mycelium which is the foundation of life. Among other things, mycelium is the grand recycler. It processes organic decay, converting it to soil. Without this
