Botanical Studies

Botanical Studies

These are a few of the sketches I did in pen, freehand, for a plant taxonomy class.

I did all these sketches in a beautiful book with a murano glass insert placed in the cover, given to me by the Brown family . The lab consisted mainly of us coming in to table after table of plants, and we had a couple hours to learn enough about its distinguishing features to be able to identify another, different plant of the same family. I really loved this class. It was a great excuse to draw, and hang out with plants.

Warning: I'm a bit of a plant geek and it shows here.

The Magnolia family was one of the first families we got to study. I had a great time sketching this plant, and all the little scars left after the petals drop off and it makes its fruit.

These are my sketches of a sticky monkey flower that we dissected under a microscope. These flowers really are quite fuzzy and sticky.

This page is of the Proteas, which are native to Austrailia and South Africa (but can grow quite well in Santa Cruz, CA). These flowers had very waxy parts, so they almost felt made of plastic. Many seeds of this plant will not drop until they have been burned by fire.

More plants in the mustard family. The top one is the mustard plant that you see growing wild all over Northern California (I also did a water color of a mustard flower). The bottom flower is an Arabidopsis. It's a tiny plant with little flowers, but it's quite famous in the plant science world. It's studied for its mutations, so specific genes have been linked to certain mutations. It can have some cool mutations. Like there is a mutation where instead of stamens (the little filaments, often yellow, you often see inside of flowers), it will grow more flowers on the inside of the flower. Or it will grow petals instead of stamens, or be a flower made out of leaves, or a flower made out of stamens.

This is a money plant we studied, which is in the mustard family.

This was a very tall bush growing outside at the UCSC greenhouse.

Portulacaceae is the family that miner's lettuce is in. It's a cool family, because the plants look so different from one another. Many of the plants in this family are succulents.

The Fabaceaea family is the pea family. Beautiful lupines belong to this family, and there is nothing like seeing a hillside covered with them.