![]() ![]() In “Secrets of the Friendly Woods,” he wrote about nature with a mix of genial animism and psychological insight. ![]() He was keenly interested in making accurate images of birds, but he was also interested in learning from birds. ![]() Brasher might be considered the patron saint of that project. Gilbert Pearson, who helped found the organization that would ultimately become the National Audubon Society (“When you see a Brasher bird, you have seen the bird itself, lifelike and in a natural attitude”).īetween the early days of the artist-woodsman ornithologists and the death of Brasher a century and a half later, the science of ornithology spun off a vital and flourishing adjunct: birdwatching. He was praised by naturalists including John Burroughs (“he is the greatest bird painter of all time”) and T. Today, a complete set of his printed work can fetch more than $40,000. Later, when he began hand-coloring more than 87,000 individual plates for publication, the project attracted subscriptions from collectors and patrons, as well as universities and libraries. But his life’s project to document American birds, an effort to outdo Audubon that began in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s, was celebrated in its day, with an exhibition at the Explorers Hall of the National Geographic Society in 1938. This video is part of Missing Chapter, our series on hidden histories, now on its third season.Born in 1869, Brasher left an enormous body of paintings, almost 900 large-scale watercolors documenting American bird life and habitat, that became the source material for a monumental 12-volume compendium of hand-colored reproductions published as “Birds & Trees of North America.” He also made an unknown number of miscellaneous paintings and drawings, wrote a delightfully eccentric volume of philosophical reflections called “ Secrets of the Friendly Woods,” and penned a hand-illustrated autobiographical account of his early forays, by sailboat, to document waterfowl from New England to Florida.īrasher was a retiring artist - a modest man who lived much of his life off the grid - which may be one reason he isn’t more famous. Check out the video above for more on how the US got the poinsettia. In his role as minister to Mexico, he meddled so much in local politics that he was asked to leave the country.īecause of that history - and the fact that the US still corners the lucrative poinsettia market while restricting their imports from Mexico - many people today reject the name poinsettia in favor of the plant’s Native name, cuetlaxochitl. Poinsett was an enslaver and a firm believer in American expansion, and during his tenure as secretary of war he oversaw the displacement of thousands of Native Americans. Many around the world started calling the plant “poinsettia” to celebrate Poinsett’s legacy. In Mexico, Poinsett saw the plant - called cuetlaxochitl by the Aztecs and with a long history of use in the region - and shipped some cuttings back to the US. It was named for the first US minister to Mexico: Joel Poinsett. Depending on where you live, there is one plant that you can spot anywhere during the winter holiday season (outside of, well, Christmas trees): poinsettias. ![]()
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