The Things I’ve Seen

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.” - Marco Polo on his deathbed, 1324, apparently? Uncharted said so.

“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Pierre de Fermat, though that was about maths.

Today is something a little different—for Christmas I got a box of adventure cards across the State of Georgia. There's 50 different cards that take you in an Indiana Jones-esque town hopping adventure across the State¹ . It's kinda far flung and I'm the resident adventure hound in the house, so I don't expect to be able to write about them too often, but one was nearby in Athens, GA so I had to try that one. The best part of these cards is they have a scratch off layer. I love a good scratch-off, and these pay off better than the Lotto² .

And so, without further ado, I present:

Adventure 1: The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia

I've actually already been here. Quite a lot, actually, back many years ago. It's a great place to go for a walk on one of its many trails, especially for UGA students. The Founders Memorial Garden is closer at hand for a pretty place to sit a bit between classes, but the botanical gardens have scale. It also has strong ties to the University of Georgia.

Proposed in 1967, the then-called University of Georgia Botanical Garden started construction in 1970. In 1971, Jimmy Carter (Governor of Georgia) and his wife Rosalynn toured the site and allocated state funding to create a master plan. More funding came in, a big chunk from the Callaway Foundation for the headquarter building. The 80s saw a visitor center and conservatory building and more state funding.

That and the day chapel were the state of the art when I used to be a regular, though there have been new developments. They host the Winter Wonderlights every December-ish, a walk through holiday light display, and they dedicated a massive child playscape in 2019 which is a must see, especially if you have a little one. I don't have a date for this one, but it's new in the past few years and it's what I will focus on because it was pretty new for me…

The Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum

First off, the building itself is striking. The Botanical Gardens don't do architecture by halves. This is really evident at the Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum, which stands next to the visitor's center and conservatory which was built in the 80s. They both have styles contemporary to their eras, a bit of a contrast that wouldn't be there if they were just blocks of buildings. It's a little jarring, but honestly, it's nice to see that architecture still matters in some places.

Inside, they go through a few different exhibits and explain a little bit about ceramics. Porcelain is a specific type of ceramic known for its delicacy, strength³ , and translucency. If I caught on properly, there are two primary types of porcelain: paste porcelains, which can be hard or soft, and bone china. China (the dynastic China, not the porcelain products) really got into the hard paste process which was at the time considered premium porcelain. England never got the hang of it, but some enterprising person with too many bodies around decided that bone ash would make a good additive to soft paste porcelain, and bone china was born⁴ .

Remember the Carters? They have a little nod in here. Rosalynn Carter received a porcelain Camellia. A gift that “will always occupy a special place in our home,” it now occupies a special if perhaps a bit inconspicuous place in the Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum. Incredible statesmanship, even after her death. Truly one of the greats, if First Ladies are measured that way.

Porcelain in general requires a base, and clay or kaolin are pretty common. I caught a few sights of a display on the other uses of materials, so I’ll leave those here:

The Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica

In 1752, botanist Georg C. Oeder⁵ of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden was commissioned to catalog all of the plants in the kingdom. King Frederik V of Denmark, in the height of the Enlightenment, made the decree that the Kingdom’s resources would be used to advance the flourishing sciences, and documentation was the first step⁶ .

The first book was published nine years later, in 1761, based off of 60 plates. This part is going to have some strong Audubon Geiger House vibes. Keep in mind, we’re almost a century before Audubon’s Birds of America. Over the next ten years, momentum builds—the book was so well received that incredible resources were poured into the Flora Danica project. From inception, the project spanned 131 years (completed in 1883) and multiple overseers. There are 51 volumes of the Flora Danica, spanning 3,240 plant motifs, and the Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum has at least part of this collection!

This is the part where I betray you, cherished reader: I have been here before. It’s pretty new to me in the way that it wasn’t, because I’ve seen it. My betrayal comes with a really cool note, I hope: that display table on the top used to have a volume out, on display. You couldn’t touch it, but YOU COULD SEE A PAGE FROM AN ACTUAL FLORA DANICA VOLUME. I unfortunately don’t have a picture of it, and I hope it’s temporary⁷ , because how incredible an opportunity—to see a book like this, just, out on display.

Anyway, the Flora Danica was more than just an Enlightenment breach into documenting the natural world. In 1788, Russia and Sweden go to war. Denmark is a defensive ally of Russia, but refuses to join the fight. Battles upon battles end in stalemate, and Russia’s key ally is not there to tip the scales. King Christian VII of Denmark knows he has to make amends to Empress Catherine II (the Great). She is a renowned collector of porcelain, and what finer gift than to commission the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory to create a 100 place setting of fine porcelain for her. And, as porcelain is prized for its translucency and ability to be decorated, what finer inspiration to effect that decoration than the Flora Danica?

The service was never delivered, as Catherine the Great passed before it could be finished. The service remains in Denmark today, now on display to the public in the Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen. That sounds really cool. Obviously the Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum is not in Copenhagen (or I got some really defective adventure cards), but they do have a Tree of Life display, designed by Virginia F. White and Deen Day Sanders, similarly inspired. It’s a shame they couldn’t get any of the original collection, as the manufactory made over 1800 pieces to fit the collection, far more than the 100 commissioned for Catherine the Great.

Assorted other fun things

Here’s a whole room full of tea sets:

Here’s a set of monkey musicians, dressed in costume, making a monkey band. Modeled by Johann Joachim Kaendler and Peter Reinicke and completed in 1766, it’s a great example that art can be fun and ridiculous and satirical. Who could look at these li’l guys and not be entertained?

Don’t miss the restroom - I used the men’s room, which had barber’s basins. I hear the women’s room has differently themed pieces, but to be honest, I’m not much for taking pictures in restrooms in general…I didn’t press my welcome here.

If you miss the restroom, you’ll also miss the rose room just beyond.

The Lights by Day

I’m a sucker for lights, and the Winter Wonderlights display is a fun walk through of holiday spectacle, overlaying the portions of the garden around the welcome center, conservatory, and museum. It walks through part of the children’s garden, so while I was there I saw a few sights of a light show by day:

It’s Over!

That’s it for this issue. I could probably⁸ write more, but I’m already behind on getting stuff out and something needs to ship. I have a few stories in progress:

• A recent road trip to Nashville got me plenty of material

• A whole box of adventure cards

• There’s still Key West stuff!

Let me know what sounds most interesting. Adventure (cards) might have to take a back seat to life for a few weeks, but it’s not like I have a lack of material—there’s no excuse to not write even if I won’t be scratching more cards in the immediate future. But more cards will be scratched, I assure you! That’s a good thing: I’d rather have a backlog that I can work through. There’s always something on deck.

Enjoy, and see you next time.

A side note

It hasn’t come up yet, but no—I don’t use generative AI in my writing process. This is my hobby, not a job. The whole point is to hone my craft, to share what’s in my head. Generative AI can’t do that because it’s not me. It could certainly fill out a content mill, if my goal was to just shove summaries of places out. The goal here, though, is to challenge me to distill my experience into a format that’s something other than my own mind. A nice added bonus is, as all the content of the world is consumed and regurgitated, my little bit of space will become part of the mathematically average sentence.

One odd thing is I have picked up the em dash. I’ve started on my journey to appreciate typography. I’m looking into fonts with ligatures! And, I’ve adopted the em dash. Apparently, some AI detection tools think em dashes are a sign that generative tooling wrote a piece. These generative tools are trained on what’s out there, though. In my adoption of the em dash, I am not writing like AI. Generative AI tooling is writing like me, and many others. Anyway, I ran across some cool swag that supports writer tools I thought I’d pass along. We’re now officially team “defend the em dash.”

References

• Flora Danica

• The Danica Experience lecture

• Various Wikipedia articles for additional reference

Thanks for joining me, where I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000! I hope you enjoyed it. Here’s all the beehiiv stuff that is required to be here.

— Lou

1  I also got Indiana Jones and the Great Circle which I highly recommend. Probably why it's on my mind.

2  In experiences at least. Their cash winnings value is likely about the same.

3  A seeming oxymoron, it is delicate (easy to shatter when dropped, for example) but can be incredibly thin and still resilient to things like silverware, etc. where other materials would chip, crack, or mar. Ceramic materials are used in high-temperature applications. CoorsTek (yes, THAT Coors) deals with all kinds of high-temperature and high-stress applications of ceramics, and ceramic plates are in the ranks of some of the best small-arms protection body armor can afford.

4  I think it’s a bit more funny in a macabre way to think of it this way. Bone ash was a key component of several manufacturing processes through history in the Western world, so honestly it’s not that big a leap to say “hey let’s try this thing that works in metallurgy for clay”. It does make for a less interesting quip, though.

5  No relation to Spiders Georg as far as I could tell.

6  I suppose it was a distraction from the Atlantic Slave Trade which Denmark was waist deep in at the time.

7  I had already talked one docent’s ear off, I didn’t have the good will to take the other by this point.

8  lol. lmao.