USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection | Hacker News Reader

USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

naldc.nal.usda.gov

111 pointsbookofjoe30 comments

Fun to see this up here! I played a role in getting these high resolution images put online, through some FOIA work and public advocacy: https://parkerhiggins.net/2015/04/us-government-release-7584...

I also uploaded the collection to Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:USD...

And for several years have run a Twitter bot that posts one image every few hours: https://twitter.com/pomological/

I happened on these in this 2019 story: https://www.openculture.com/2019/06/the-us-government-commis...

Open Culture credited 2017 Morsel (now defunct) story: https://www.morselnewyork.com/foodart/2017/10/3/over-100-yea...

Amazing. Thank you!

The USDA National Agriculture Library has a bunch of cool digital exhibits: https://www.nal.usda.gov/collections/exhibits

They also host free webinars about food, agriculture, and ecology.

If you’re in Beltsville, Maryland, you can visit and see the collections in person: https://specialcollections.nal.usda.gov/visit-special-collec...

Also, their building, the Lincoln Building, is really cool architecturally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Agric...

If you'd prefer hard copies of these watercolors, there's a recent apple "opus" that came out that includes 1400 of them: https://www.jakkawpress.com/. It's a six volume set, currently marked down to $150. I'm tempted.

"The lavishly illustrated hardcover set of seven volumes (each 500-600 pages, 8½” x 11”) comprehensively documents all apple varieties that have appeared in publications in the United States and Canada through the year 2000."

16000 varieties. And only through the year 2000. I'm stunned at the diversity of the apple.

Not to detract from your wonder, but apples aren't true-to-seed... so each new seedling could potentially produce a named variety (although most end up trash trees either with undesirable fruit or susceptible to disease).

Oooh, me too. I have no idea why this is so appealing.

I have a set, it is definitely worth every penny.

At first I thought these were cute little still lifes, but from the date range ... were these of scientific use during a period when color photography wasn't easily accessible? I'm aware that color photography did exist and was producing pretty good results in the early 20th century. By the late 30s/early 40s, would it be surprising to still be using watercolors to try to capture and convey images where subtle color differences are important?

Look at a modern-day plant or animal field guide. A lot of the time you'll find drawings, not photos. Getting color "correct" in photos isn't that much easier (esp in the past, digital workflows help), and drawings are flexible in presenting the right amount of detail, optimal perspectives and perfectly "representative" specimens. Of course with plants you don't have the problem of them running away and not sitting still properly, so you can pose photos well, but drawings are still done a lot.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pome#English

- "(botany) A type of fruit in which the often edible flesh arises from the swollen base of the flower and not from the carpels."

- "Hyponyms: apple, pear, quince"

- "The best-known example of a pome is the apple."

Also, from the Oxford English Dictonary:

Pome: "Botany. The type of fruit that is characteristic of the apple (Malus domestica), the pear (Pyrus communis), and related members of the family Rosaceae, which consists of a fleshy, enlarged receptacle enclosing a tough central core (the true fruit), formed from several united carpels and containing the seeds." Outside of botany, that usage is obsolete.

The definition of pomology is broader, however: "The branch of horticulture concerned with the cultivation of fruit."

Wouldn't pictorial representations of fruit, such as the watercolours here, be pomography?

Looked into scraping some data from this, here are some URL templates worth mentioning:

https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download_image/master_image/POM00...

The link above will give you full-sized images, but only for download (just change the POM ID to view a different image). Also:

https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/POM00007435/screen

The link above will give you thumbnails that you can view in browser.

I'm considering making a taxonomic tree (and then forget formal phylogeny and include the varieties) with the thumbnail images. Similar to another pet project of mine.

There was a fun twitter bot that used these designs to generate new fruits. Source code in the bio. https://twitter.com/new_fruits

Now I really want to make a version with GANs.. This fruit does not exist!

as they say, keming is important.

yes, but they're still nice looking peaches.

juicy

Is there a general term for this style of artwork where biological species are drawn from different angles / sections in old books? I always love them when I see them. I'm really interested learning more about it.

Botanical drawing or botanical illustration.

I clicked on this by mistake at work: I thought it said pornological.

Java projects always get me excited when I see a pom.xml file.

And so did I!

Github repo: https://github.com/jwilber/USDA_Pomological_Watercolors

I think it would be very cool if the government made an NFT collection out of this and other collected works, in all seriousness. It's actually quite easy, and little to no programming is required.

This is also my first thought - USDA needs to get on the NFT game with these artworks esp since there's a historical element to these works. I'm sure there will be people who want to collect these.

These graphics have been digitized at a high resolution, so they can be infinitely, perfectly duplicated. As works of the US government they are inherently uncopyrightable, so there is no legal barrier to copying them either. Thus, these images are completely limitless. Why would you want to introduce artificial scarcity of such a resource?

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