A late-January snowfall had draped the grounds of the Holden Arboretum with blankets of pillowy white. "This is a perfect library day, isn't it?" Holden Arboretum President Clem Hamilton said, greeting the plant lovers who hadn't let the weather keep them from his class.
"Journey back to the Renaissance and explore the New World using Holden's Rare Book Collection," the class description read. OK, this was not a subject that would propel a lot of people out of their beds on a frigid Saturday morning. But since I love Renaissance history and old books, I was as excited as if I had been scheduled to visit a chocolate factory.
Hamilton explained that we would start with a classroom slide show, then move into the library to see the treasures we had just learned about. He promised us stories about the advancement of botanical knowledge in the Renaissance and discoveries in the New World.
When we think of scientific advancement, we usually think of things like the invention of the printing press or the realization that the Earth orbits the sun. Renaissance scholars were also curious about trees, animals and flowers. Holden's rare botanical books show how mankind's understanding of the natural world developed and how it coped with the discovery of new species in the New World.
The slide show started with Holden's oldest book, a 1483 edition of "Herbarium." The drawings were so crude, it was hard to tell what plants the author was trying to describe. The illustrations also showed a monster climbing into a boat to snack on fishermen, and a fish with arms.
Clearly, I thought, these scholars were very confused.
We plunged into the botanical discoveries of North America in the 1600s. Drawings of American trees, like native sycamore and sumac, were beginning to be included in texts. I was surprised to learn that that authors, who had never set foot in the New World, wrote huge volumes on the continent's plant life just by examining seeds and plants sent to England.
I remembered Captain Bligh's precious breadfruit trees chucked overboard by a mutinous Fletcher Christian in the movie "Mutiny on the Bounty." If I were a sailor, would I give up my precious water ration to save a rare tree? Yes, I decided, but only if I were guaranteed that the new species would be named after me.
Hamilton's enthusiasm sparkled every time he described something as "pretty neat" or "cool stuff." He wrapped up his slide show by introducing us to Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who standardized plant names. Before that, every writer made up his own names, and some plants had up to 11 names strung together.
Mr. Linnaeus, on behalf of writers and proofreaders everywhere, we thank you.
Now it was time to see real books. Hamilton asked us to wash our hands before handling the volumes, and that I put away my pen and take notes with a pencil. With those requests met, we entered the library where 10 rare books were laid open.
Here was my chance to take an up-close look at "Herbarium." It was about the size of a journal, with smooth, cream-colored pages. Its Latin phrases and illustrations were rendered in grayish-black ink, as if someone has spilled water into an inkwell.
Another one was an 1828 edition of "Description of the Genus Pinus" by Aylmer Lambert. This huge book, with pages measuring about 15 by 24 inches, was devoted to pine trees. The larger-than-life illustrations were gorgeous renderings of the trees' inner workings -- ripe pine cones, seeds, branches heavy with long needles. The images were so vivid, they seemed to float on the pages.
A fellow classmate and Kirtland resident, Michael Chicchelly, moved aside so we could both examine a book of portraits of famous trees in England. Chicchelly, who dabbles in drawing and printmaking, pointed out the crosshatched lines that created shaded areas in the images, and the faint indentation that an ink-filled plate made when it was stamped on the page.
During the 1800s, Chicchelly said, one person did the drawing and a second person did the etching. "I like to see how they decided to draw them," he said.
We silently considered a portrait of a yew tree, its huge trunk and profusion of branches making it a noble tree indeed.
"It's really beautiful," Chicchelly said, and we both felt lucky that these books had been preserved through the centuries for us to appreciate today.