Journal of a Sabbatical

August 6, 1999

the botanical department

I can see myself working in a crumbling old building covered with vines, the exterior walls nicked with bullet holes from Russian guns in 1956, behind an iron gate in the middle of downtown Budapest. It has a certain romanticism to it. The botanical department of the natural history museum is in just such a building. It wears its vines and bullet holes proudly.

We had tea with the deputy director (the director is off at a botanical conference in St. Louis - poor director, St. Louis in August is like the humidity capital of the world) in an office full of beautiful antique furniture from the fine arts museum.

After tea, he took us on a tour of the botanical department. The aisles of the herbarium are dark with eerie glints of light from the huge windows. There are rows and rows and rows of gray metal cabinets, all numbered, containing pressed specimens. The deputy director opened a couple of cabinets and showed us some beautifully pressed specimens. Some of them, like the one in the picture, are 200 years old. The color is well preserved too - I guess they were never treated with alcohol.

The hallway walls are lined with paintings by Vera Csapody, the late botanical artist who worked on the Dendrological Atlas project with Zsolt and István. Botanical illustration is definitely where science and art come together. It was a rare treat to see so many of these wonderful paintings.

Also on display in a corridor are the red boxes containing the collection of Kossuth Lajos (actually I should transpose that to Lajos Kossuth since I transposed Vera Csapody above - Hungarian puts the family name first like Japanese), nationalist revolutionary and amateur botanist. After the failed freedom-fight in 1849, Kossuth was forced to leave the country and ended up in Italy. With nothing else to do he documented the flora of the Italian Alps and Apennines. The booklet about the history of the botanical department says Kossuth "turned for comfort to sciences, in the first place, botany." I can't imagine a political exile taking comfort in science these days.

The "memory room" commemorates old botanists. Their desks, typewriters, handwritten letters arranged on the desks like a 19th century still life remind me of the Dublin Writer's Museum with its collection of typewriters and spectacles. When István is long gone will they display his laptop?

Today's highlight is old books. Really old books. Gábor, the librarian, showed us the rare book room of the botanical department's library. When he pulled a volume of the Flora Danica off the shelf, Carol gasped. The illustrations are exquisite. A large folio, hundreds of years old, with even more wonderful illustrations takes my breath away. So detailed! People had a lot more time and paid a lot more attention to detail in those days.

Gábor brought out the oldest book in the collection, dating from 1494! Five hundred years old and still in good condition. These old books had good paper (or vellum) not the decaying cheap paper used nowadays. We will have lost something profound when we lose books. I had this awful feeling of culture slipping away and disappearing in a maze of incompatible media formats. István says he doesn't think books will go away. After all, scientists at MIT are trying even now to make computer displays more like books. I go back and forth on this issue. Some days I despair and think books are doomed by the inevitable, unstoppable advance of technology. Other days I think nobody's yet invented anything better and are unlikely to. So, examining the oldest book, left to right, István, Judy, Gábor, Keith, Carol (and I think that's Isabel's arm between Keith and Carol - I cropped out Mary's elbow).

The public display area of the natural history museum is across town and was a little bit of a disappointment after the treasure trove of the botanical department. It was fun though, and we attended the opening of a photo exhibit of Greenland. Photos of ice? I'm there. Ice fascinates me beyond belief. Paradoxically, I started to feel too hot to look at photos of ice. Hmm.

Back at the white house, we worked on the Taiwan specimens some more. If I never see another piece of that awful pink plastic stuff they tied the Taiwan bundles with it'll be too soon. And don't the seeds of Taiwanese plants ever stay put?

Just as we were at our sweatiest and dirtiest, a news photographer arrived to take our picture. Don't know what paper he was from but if you see some very dirty people holding pine cones in a Hungarian language paper, that's us.