PBA Galleries

With silver photograph of Yosemite Valley measuring 17.5x26 cm. (6¾x10¼") on the hand-lettered title-leaf; 102 mounted hand-tinted silver photographs of plants, each measuring 15x9.8 cm. (6x4"), with mounted typed captions below the images, interleaved with glassine. Album is 23.5x36 cm. (9½x14¼"), full flexible morocco, string ties.

Remarkable album put together by the photographer known for his landscapes of Yosemite National Park, here taking a more intensive view of the botanical wonders. A graduate of Stanford with a background in biology and botany,  and encouraged by his parents who were both medical doctors, he became aware of the steady reduction in the number and types of wild flowers that blossomed in the meadows there. In 1912 he built the first lapse-time camera, made the first nature movie showing the dance of a flower raising its face to the sun and managed to persuade the National Park Service to stop the practice of mowing the meadows to produce fodder for their horses. His specimen cards of flowers, hand tinted at the studio, were often framed for use in the meadows to identify the many types of plants blooming there. These are examples of those cards, gathered together in a single album. These were evidently produced in very small numbers, if there were multiples at all - no copies listed in OCLC/WorldCat.