Colouring-in with pencil-crayons for Data

This here is the nice picture of rhododendrons I made last year with coloured pencils. It's a Rhododendron oreodexa var. oreodexa and a  Rhododendron oreodexa var. fargesii.

 

I got very interested in leaf scars, nodes, axial buds - places where differentiation happens, or happened, where cells decide to be one thing or another.  How do you know?  How do you make those decisions, if you are a rhododendron cell?

They ain't like us, you know, they are having their whole life cycles all over their bodies all the time. Sort of. Well it's a mind-boggler, to me, this business of having meristems, of never being finished....

Anyway the Data thing is a claim I made when I was asking someone for money recently; "botanical illustration is one of the last places on earth where colouring-in has been a useful way of presenting data" I claimed. (Words to that effect.)

Well that is perfectly true as far as it goes and I could support that claim if pushed and all that. What I am trying to feel my way around now is where we could possibly go with that stuff now...

I mean, you know, now we've got gel electrophoresis and x-ray crystallography and all that jazz.

And do these representations of the individuation of species correspond to my worldview?

Etc.  Meanwhile,

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

By the way, as I am writing this, my Beloved is "educating" his son about music. You have to imagine this post with a jolly soundtrack.