botanical drawing

We have proposed developing and launching a new content collection titled “Plants & Society.” It will be a multi-format resource center—including primary sources, journals, and books—that builds on JSTOR’s existing resources in Ecology, Botany, and the Plant Sciences to provide an innovative lens for examining the complex relationships of plants with nature, society, and humanity. This collection will focus on the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental implications and uses of plants, and will help researchers and students to position the importance of plants in understanding these societal issues. In so doing, the collection will draw upon materials from a range of complementary disciplines, including Anthropology, Art & Art History, Botany & Plant Sciences, Garden History & Design, Ecology, Economics, History & History of Science, Horticulture, and Landscape Architecture.

After extensive research, we have been engaging directly with a large number of historians, librarians, and faculty at a wide range of institutions both within and outside of the Global Plants participant and partner base. Feedback from faculty and librarians in these fields has been overwhelmingly positive, indicating a need and desire for this resource:

“I find this initiative very encouraging to my discipline which is variously called arboriculture, urban forestry, urban horticulture, urban landscape restoration, etc. This field is incredibly interdisciplinary. Efforts to gather the resources together can only enrich the filed.”
– Nina Bassuk, Professor and Program Leader, Urban Horticulture Institute, Cornell

“I am delighted to see this and think that this will be a fantastic additional resource that would indeed be very helpful in research and teaching.”
– Sonja Duempelmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

“From my perspective, I love the idea of this project as I feel the [Landscape Architecture] resources are really lacking, even though they are an inter-disciplinary field.”
– Megan Lotts, MFA, MLIS, Art Librarian, Rutgers