"We looked for examples that go from the precision of scientific and botanical illustration and plant portraits that tell the whole story of a plant, to the more emotional approach of botanical painting and flower painting".
With an old Rolleiflex, the gift of Wilhelm Schacht, curator of Munich's botanic garden, she built up a library of 50,000 transparencies of plant portraits, and some of such gardeners as Margery Fish, David Shackleton and Vita Sackville-West.
Yet his long career straddled many genres, including landscapes and cityscapes, plant portraits and architecture, corporate and advertising work, and a host of related activities involving film direction and production, teaching and writing, and lots of travel, mainly in the US, the far east and across Europe.
Opening "Plant Portraits" by nursery owner and London garden columnist Beth Chatto, I expected to find pictures of baby's breath and other graceful plants in watercolor tints.
This former church turned-craft-beer shrine embraces its former life with a Munich-style biergarten adorned with stained glass, along with hops plants, various portraits of The Last Supper, three bars (including an upstairs choir loft), and a meticulously curated menu of high-ABV, hard-to-find international beers and exotic pub grub.
The 9-by-12-inch botanical prints are complemented by 100 plant and landscape portraits shot by Druse.
Senior portrait of plant sciences major Alfonso Doucette (right).
Those with a vivid memory of Stephanie Seymour squatting in Richard Avedon's 1994 portrait to plant a kiss on her favorite designer, her naked buttocks leaving her Alaïa chaps with the whooosh of an automobile in a snowbound slide, will surely debate the point that strength is the essential ingredient of an Alaïa.
The juxtaposition of portrait and plant are so tactfully blended that they disorient the viewer, inviting sci-fi enthusiasts and surrealists alike into Redback's expertly-manipulated world.
The garden's raised center section offers focus to what appears to be a well-organized hodgepodge jungle of plants like a Gaugin portrait.
A probing portrait of early plant-breeding technologies unearths surprising roots of genetic engineering efforts.
