Long before the arts and the sciences were the uneasy allies they've become today, they coexisted in relative harmony in the libraries and collections of botanical gardens. This is amply demonstrated in Flora Illustrata: Great Works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, edited by Susan M. Fraser and Vanessa Bezemer Sellers (Yale University Press, $50), which presents some of the most rigorous, as well as the strangest and most beautiful, forms of scientific investigation into plants and gardens. Culled from more than one million items in the New York Botanical Garden's research collections, Flora Illustrata offers 279 illustrations from the collections organized around thematic holdings and accompanied by scholarly essays. The botanists' and horticulturists' arts are well represented here, as are the commerce of plants and the myriad expressions of European garden and estate design, but the focus remains on plant life, in all its exquisite and unsettling glory.
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机译：在艺术和科学成为今天的不安盟友之前很久，它们就以相对和谐的方式并存于植物园的图书馆和藏品中。 Susan M. Fraser和Vanessa Bezemer Sellers编辑的《纽约植物园的LuEsther T. Mertz图书馆的伟大著作》充分证明了这一点（耶鲁大学出版社，50美元），其中介绍了一些最严格的，以及对植物和花园进行的最奇怪，最美丽的科学研究形式。从纽约植物园研究收藏中的超过一百万件物品中剔除出来的Flora Illustrata提供了279张插图集，这些插图集围绕主题藏品和学术论文而组织。植物学家和园艺家的艺术在这里得到了很好的体现，植物的贸易以及欧洲花园和庄园设计的无数表达也是如此，但是焦点仍然集中在植物的生命上，其所有精美而令人不安的荣耀。
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