Insights into our collections
Herbert Dobbie’s cyanotypes of New Zealand ferns
How one man’s fascination with ferns led to the creation of an innovative album of camera-less photographs
New Zealand Ferns is a photobook of life-sized images of ferns. It was made by Herbert Dobbie in 1888 using cyanotype, a camera-less form of photography invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and pioneered as a method of scientific illustration by the botanist and photographer Anna Atkins.
Herbert Dobbie and fern fever
Born in Southeast England in 1852, Dobbie grew up in Cumbria, where he began collecting ferns during the school holidays. Ferns were wildly popular in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Pteridomania – or fern fever – gripped people throughout the British Isles and the Empire. The invention of the Wardian case, a sealed wood and glass container in which ferns thrived, enabled their transportation across the globe, and ferns were enthusiastically collected and cultivated by botanists, gardeners, and amateur naturalists alike. Ferns were displayed in the home, and in public spaces such as theatres and galleries. Fern motifs also became hugely popular in the decorative arts.
Emigration to New Zealand
In 1875, aged twenty-three, Dobbie emigrated to New Zealand. On arriving in Auckland, he set out almost immediately for the Waitakere Ranges, where he was overwhelmed by the abundance and variety of ferns he encountered. He started to travel widely, collecting ferns across the country on his penny-farthing bicycle. In 1877 he accepted a job in the drawing office of the New Zealand Government Railways, where blueprinting—a means of reproducing technical plans and drawings akin to cyanotype—had recently been adopted.
How are cyanotypes made?
Cyanotypes are made by laying an object – in this case a dried fern – on paper treated with a solution of iron salts, which is then exposed to ultraviolet light. After twenty minutes, the unspent solution is rinsed off with water, fixing the print. The paper’s blue background develops as it dries, leaving a silhouette of the object in white where the paper has been covered. For Dobbie, cyanotype held several advantages as a method of illustration: it was quick, economical and he possessed the technical expertise to make the images himself.
Herbert Dobbie’s approach to making New Zealand Ferns
Dobbie made three versions of New Zealand Ferns using cyanotype. The Lindley Library holds a copy of the third, which unites parts one and two in a single volume. Unusually for a book of cyanotypes, Dobbie chose to illustrate both sides of the page. To avoid double exposure, it’s likely he treated, exposed and dried each side before repeating the process on the reverse. To create the book’s textual elements, he placed a thin sheet of glass in between the fern and paper and inked the letters directly onto its surface before exposure. This enabled him to reuse his glass templates over and again for each copy of the book.
The handmade charm of cyanotypes
New Zealand Ferns is closer to a coffee-table book than a work of botanical literature. As a guide to accurate species identification, it was hindered by the fact that Dobbie’s photographs didn’t illustrate the fructification of the ferns, the key to species differentiation. In our copy, the quality of the images is uneven. The outlines of the pinnae are frequently blurry, a result of the ferns not lying flat at the time of exposure, and the intensity of the cyan blue background varies from page to page, but these inconsistencies are part of the book’s handmade charm.
We don’t know how many copies of New Zealand Ferns Dobbie produced overall, but it is now exceedingly rare, with fewer than 20 copies known to exist.
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Author
Nicky Munroe, Assistant Librarian, RHS Lindley Library
Published
17 February 2025
Insight type
Short read