The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2026.

Honor & Awards

Alice Tangerini received a Highly Commended Award for her illustration of Bahiana occidentalis (Euphorbiaceae) in the 2025 Margaret Flockton Award Exhibition. The Margaret Flockton Award is an annual, international award for excellence in scientific botanical illustration. It commemorates the contributions that Margaret Flockton (1861–1953), the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney's first scientific illustrator, made to Australian scientific botanical illustration. Every year, illustrators from around the world submit scientifically accurate drawings that accompany the published taxonomic description of a plant, clearly highlighting all of the distinctive features of the species. Tangerini’s illustration will be displayed outside of the office of the Chief Executive of the Botanic Gardens of Sydney. 

The drawing was originally made to accompany a scientific article (PhytoKeys 219: 121-144; 2023) by Kenneth Wurdack describing Bahiana occidentalis as a new species from Peru. The plant had been repeatedly collected (35 collections in 40 years) but had resisted expert identification even to genus until DNA data placed it in an evolutionary tree.

The judges made the following comments regarding Tangerini’s artwork: “Yet another use of digital media, working also with inked lines, this illustration explores the potential of rendering tone and form with variety and economy. With limited access to reference material of this new species, the artist enjoyed creating fruiting and male floral parts that glow with airbrushed-style highlights and shadows, while accurately observing the seed surface pigmentation to create depth and realism. A clever attribute of digital media, identical leaf shapes have been copied and pasted to swiftly create a sense of the habit without the hours of labour demanded by traditional media.”

The book, Smithsonian Trees of North America by W. John Kress (Yale University Press), won the Design & Artistic Merit category of the 2025 National Outdoor Book Awards (NOBA). As an educational program, the award annually honors outstanding writing and publishing in the outdoor field. The managing body of the awards is the NOBA Foundation, a non-profit, volunteer organization. The announcement was made on the NOBA website at http://www.noba-web.org/books25.htm. From the website: 

“Awestruck” is what one judge wrote.  Another who has reviewed, and evaluated books for over 20 years, awarded Smithsonian Trees of North America his highest score ever. W. John Kress has left no leaf unturned: over 800 pages of authoritative information, supplemented with several thousand photographs, with not one photograph out of focus. The book is so well designed, so well written and organized, that anyone can benefit from it whether you have a passing interest in trees or an advanced degree in botany.  This is an exceptional work, a book at the very top of its game.

W. John Kress received the 2025 Peter Raven Award given by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists to a plant systematist who has made exceptional efforts at outreach to non-scientists. The award ceremony was held in Palm Springs, California, during Botany 2025 in July. Kress was recognized for his numerous extraordinary achievements in public outreach during his career.

While Kress served as Chair of Smithsonian Botany, he initiated the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium series. The symposium series has become a major window into plant sciences and is a primary outreach platform about plants at the Smithsonian Institution and at the nation’s capital. The Weeping Goldsmith is a popular narrative book that he authored in 2009, documenting his botanical exploration and scientific discovery in the secret land of Myanmar, one of the poorly studied biodiversity hotspots in Asia. His work to bridge the disciplines of art and science was recognized in two of his co-authored books, The Art of Plant Evolution and Botanica Magnifica.

Kress was instrumental in developing the free mobile app, Leafsnap, which was the first app to use visual recognition software to help identify plant species from photographs, first released in 2011. This idea inspired the development of countless other apps that teach the public about plants. Kress’ most recent product is the monumental Smithsonian Trees of North America, published in September 2024 by Yale University Press. The book was 10 years in the making and is an indispensable illustrated source of information for over 300 species of North American trees, accompanied by range maps and 3,000 high quality photographs. It is much more than a field guide, as it also reflects on the consequences of environmental change on the health of trees, a conservation perspective he has held throughout his career. 

His strong support of the planet is also seen in his co-edited books Plant Conservation – A Natural History Approach and Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age of Humans. He has been a great orator to the public, has extensively published public oriented books, and has served the Smithsonian with distinction, which has inspired numerous people on treasuring and conserving the planet Earth.