Jeanne Baret (born 1740) was a passionate self-taught botanist who became the first woman to circumnavigate the world. To board a French naval ship for a botanical expedition, she had to disguise her gender. The work was grueling and she was brutally “found out.” Nonetheless, she lent expertise in collecting 6,000+ new plant specimens, including the Bougainvillea, named for the expedition’s leader.

For this illustration, I considered the process of gathering plant specimens. They would haul large wooden presses onto land to archive their samples, often taped onto a substrate with a small handwritten label. I wanted to give that quality of a scientific sample to the bougainvillea.