Entering

Forest Detailer National Arboretum
The Beauty of Wild Grasses, Hakone Wetlands Garden
Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden, a Gardener's Touch
Living Plant Encyclopedia: Makino Botanical Garden, Kochi Prefecture
Plant Life: Ginger and Insecta Plants, Singapore Botanic Gardens
Herb Astronomical Observatory, the scent of herbs
Fruit's Fate Jade Garden
Paris Botanical Garden, the city's horticultural garden
There are no useless plants at Pyeonggang Botanical Garden
Botany and Botanists, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Documenting Plants at the Amsterdam Botanical Garden
Ferns in the greenhouse, Korea Expressway Corporation Arboretum
Landscapes of Plant Culture: Tillandsia and Lithops at Tsukuba Botanical Garden
Childhood Plant Memories Jindai Botanical Garden
Old Trees Shinjuku Park
The Tokyo University Botanical Garden in its winter garden

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Plants
How do you like it?

There is no season that is not good for being with plants (even winter has its own joys), but spring seems to be the season for 'plant walks'.
The streets are filled with people strolling among fluttering cherry blossom petals, the forests are filled with people admiring the small leaves and colorful spring flowers that poke their heads out in warm colors that can only be seen at this time of year, and the flower market is filled with people who want to welcome companion plants for various reasons.
If you were to ask people this time of year, “Do you like plants (or any flowers, or any trees)?” they would usually either smile broadly and say yes, or just take a moment to quietly feel the presence of plants that have always been around us, doing their best.
But what if we changed this simple question a little, asking, "How do you like plants?" How to like plants.
Could we even have such a natural conversation with this question? Do we have a proper "plant culture"?

"A Botanical Walk: How a Botanical Artist Sees Plants" is a collection of stories about plants and people the author, a botanist and botanical artist, has encountered over the past decade.
But in fact, this story is also a record of my 'likes' for the plants I have had and will have in the future.
Like all 'likes' in the world, this book is filled with stories of meeting each other every day, carefully examining each other, feeling loved, surprised, cherished, sorry, and ultimately pledging and promising a better 'togetherness'.
“They say you shouldn’t turn your favorite thing into a job, but strangely enough, the more I meet and look at plants, the more I love them,” says the author. “That’s why I want to be like them,” and “I want to stay by their side and silently record the plants of this world one by one in drawings.”
Another confesses that he compiled these records into a book “with the hope that people will come to love plants more.”
So to speak, this book is a personal and beautiful record of 'how to like plants.'
As we follow the way botanical artists see plants, taking a walk through botanical gardens, arboretums, and forests around the world, from the National Arboretum to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we learn the perspective and insight needed to turn our explosive growth in plants over the past few years into something worthy of being called a culture.

A person who draws plants
How to see plants

Apples are red fruits, bracken is dried brown vegetables (stems and leaves), onions are white roots, and green onions are green leaves.
This is what the edible plants look like as we remember them.
When people look at plants, they edit and remember only the images they want to remember.
Many people don't know what they look like, but (of course) garlic has flowers, ginseng has fruit, and ginger has beautiful leaves and flowers.
The same goes for the plants you encounter on the road.
Cherry blossom trees, often remembered only for their fluttering petals, show off an exceptionally blue and refreshing appearance in midsummer when they are covered with green leaves.
Even in the depths of winter, when all the greenery has disappeared, plants reveal their true colors with the shapes of their branches, the bark of different colors and patterns, and the winter buds of various shapes.
A lush forest or a grassy field are just scenes that can be passed by, but if you look closely and examine them carefully, each and every one of them is a universe.
The appearance of plants is much more diverse and wonderful than we think.

This book contains the author's diverse experiences and stories of plants he has encountered over the past ten years, from the time he first graduated from college and began drawing and studying plants until now.
Conifers of the needleleaf forest with a long history, and Korea's precious endemic plant, the Jinnorangsangsahwa (Lycoris chinensis var.) that is as beautiful as daffodils or amaryllis.
Including sinuolata KHTae & SCKo, countless native wildflowers that live on our land, ginger plants that are widely loved as ornamentals, insectivorous plants found in deep, damp forests, herbs such as lavender, rosemary, and sage that we encounter in our daily lives, fruits such as blueberries, apples, strawberries, and grapes, edible plants such as wheat and potatoes, medicinal plants such as mugwort, bellflower root, pinellia, and cold herb, ornamental plants for their leaves such as palm, alocasia, dracaena, and rubber trees, ferns, one of the oldest plant groups on Earth, tillandsia that has recently become widely loved in Korea and lithops that show the plant culture of enthusiasts, acacia trees that I saw and smelled when I climbed Gwanaksan Mountain as a child, colorful tulips in Boramae Park, old trees cut down from the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese colonial period, and even the first azaleas to herald spring in the frozen ground… … From the perspective of someone who studies and draws plants, someone who especially loves plants, every plant, even an unknown flower in a pot that only remains faintly in memory, is special in its own way.


This book also contains stories of people who make a living dealing with these special beings.
The stories of horticulturalists from the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden in Germany, Tomitaro Makino, a representative Japanese botanist and botanical artist, botanists and plant hunters from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, which is considered the world's best botanical research institute, botanical illustrators, and researchers, early senior scholars in the Korean plant world who devoted their lives to plant research and data collection, and ordinary plant lovers who properly understand the characteristics of plant species and consume them in various ways, guide us into the 'world of plants' that has been quietly and step by step created over a long period of time.
As you walk around inside, you will naturally want to see more plants and love them more.


The details show
Plants and plant culture here and now

What's the difference between viewing plants through botanical illustration (botanical miniatures)? With the advancements in high-resolution, continuous shooting, and other photographic technologies, why are botanical illustrations still necessary? Are botanical illustrations simply about presenting plants in a beautiful and attractive way? A look into the day, year, and decade of a botanical artist (botanical miniature artist) reveals the answer.


He wakes up in the morning, packs his collecting and observation tools, and heads out into the forest.
As I wander through the forest, I check on the appearance and well-being of 'familiar plants' such as the flowers I saw yesterday, the grass I discovered last week, and the trees I saw a year ago.
Observe the daily life of plants that changes every day, and observe the form of plants that is formed by the accumulation of those daily lives.
The form of a plant is expressed through its organs, and plant detailing includes all the organs that show the form of the plant, such as roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits.
But plants never show these organs at once.
From the sprouting of leaves to the blooming of flowers and the setting of fruits, every event (form) is a moment in the life of a plant.
No matter how great the technology, a photograph that records a 'moment' ultimately only captures an instant.
But in botanical painting, these moments are accumulated to capture the life of a plant.
Additionally, while a photograph captures the appearance of a single plant individual, a botanical illustration portrays the appearance of the entire plant species to which that individual belongs.
This is why botanical drawings, which minimize individual variations and highlight the universal characteristics of a species, show the life cycle of a plant more accurately than photographs, which capture individual variations according to ecological environment, such as color and shape.
That single life is recorded as the history of the species, constantly being revised and supplemented based on existing errors or new facts discovered through research.
Through a single botanical drawing, we do not see the most beautiful moment of a single tree or a single blade of grass, but rather the entire life of that individual, from seed to fruit, and further, the natural history of the entire plant species to which that individual belongs.