Chris Thorogood
@thorogoodchris1
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Associate Professor of Biology at Oxford University | Deputy Director of Oxford Botanic Garden | Artist | Author | Insta: @IllustratingBotanist | Views mine
Looking at plants somewhere.
Joined December 2015
As a botanist I get to study the world's most remarkable plants. Here are some I've encountered in Southeast Asia in the last two weeks:
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STUNNING new family book by @jondrori showing how plants' lives and ours are intertwined. Imaginative, beautiful, fun x
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A pencil portrait I've just completed featuring Rhizanthes deceptor - one of the world's strangest flowers - and its custodians, in the Sumatran rainforest.
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A montage of nature I have painted over the years:
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Today we described a new species of 'desert hyacinth': Cistanche mimii, from the Middle East. Welcome to science you beautiful thing ✨ Published in @PhytoKeys.
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A pencil portrait I've just completed featuring a farmer I met in Inner Mongolia. Like many of my subjects, I suppose he'll never see his portrait - never know that the brief moment my orbit swung into his would be captured forever in graphite ✨
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Little dancing little stars ✨ The seed-heads of a pincushion starflower (Lomelosia stellata).
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A pencil sketch I've just completed depicting Ma Xue Mei, a farmer I met on an expedition to Inner Mongolia who grows medicinal plants sustainably.
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Turning over a fern leaf reveals an astonishing stencilled constellation of spores:
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Ghost flowers (Monotropa uniflora) rise from the forest floor like pale seahorses. They lack leaves, roots and chlorophyll because rather than manufacturing food from sunlight, they steal it from an underground fungus.
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Once in a while one of my succulents sends a star into the world ⭐
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It was a privilege to meet these farmers in Inner Mongolia last month. Sketching is my little way of thanking the world for the beauty it sends my way x
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The floating leaves of the mosaic plant (Ludwigia sedioides) form self-assembling rafts of diamonds that slowly conquer the water:
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We deep-dived into the genomes of water lilies to see how some produce enormous leaves:
The genome of giant waterlily provides insights into the origin of angiosperms, leaf gigantism, and stamen function innovation by @thorogoodchris1 and colleagues June featured research article from #PlantCommunications (@MPlantPCom) https://t.co/AjZGJpKqZl
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Some pitcher plants of Borneo I have just finished illustrating in pen and ink:
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Here are samples of 'meat ginseng' (Cistanche deserticola) I saw on an expedition to the Inner Mongolian desert last month. These curious forms are the underground stems of a herb harvested for Traditional Chinese Medicine. The fat, scaly stems - used as a tonic for strength -
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Today on a roadside in southern Italy, I found picris broomrape (Orobanche picridis), a rare parasitic plant that sends up ambitious spears of white blossom. It is my gift to conjure these plants out of the earth wherever I go 💫
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Today on a sun-soaked slab in the south of Italy, I found wild leeks (Allium ampeloprasum); their stems were like swans' necks, craning to see the sun 🌞
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A watercolour illustration of Nepenthes stenophylla I've just completed:
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