Museum – The Cambridge Placebook

March 2, 2023February 22, 2023

Lived-in Beauty: Kettle’s Yard

Imagine being confident enough in the aesthetic value of your own domestic whimsy that you display your house for the world in perpetuity. This is what Jim Ede, art collector and friend to artists, did when he bequeathed his Cambridge house and its contents—dubbed Kettle’s Yard—to the University in 1966. He requested that every piece of modern art, every stone and seedpod, every quotidian artifact remain as it was when he was living there. He and his wife Helen even continued to live there while displaying their house for another seven years, continuing a longer tradition of open houses for students and Cambridge residents—a gentle, informal introduction to modern art and a way of life.

November 6, 2021January 4, 2022

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is like the cool cousin of London. I wouldn’t be surprised if its popularity as a quick holiday destination has only increased during the pandemic, domestic travel being a hot commodity. I’d only ever heard good things about it but hadn’t managed to get there, despite it being only a 5-hr train ride the length of England from Cambridge. I was determined to squeeze it in before the term got into full swing or any unforeseen disruptions *cough* Covid *cough* got in the way, so my friend Marie and I made a long weekend of the Edinburgh bucket list. Hills, castles, kilts, neogothic grandeur, bagpipes, haggis, hipster art—we fit all of it in.

September 13, 2020July 5, 2021

Wellington pt. 2: Treasure Box

Nov 25-27

After a few days of watching presentations and talking to other scientists about Australasian plants and their classification and evolution(and eating really good food), as well as giving my own presentation about hebes, I took some time to wander around the Te Papa museum. Te Papa Tongarewa, the full name of the msueum, means Our Place in Māori (I’ve also seen it translated roughly as “treasure box”) and is the national museum of New Zealand, showcasing cultural and natural history. There’s a lot to learn about indigenous Māori culture and history—and in general on this trip I came to appreciate how visible and respected this culture is in New Zealand. There was also an excellent new exhibit put on by the Natural History department called Te Taiao Nature, spotlighting New Zealand’s flora and fauna and geology. In addition to the visible exhibits, the museum is a repository for collections of natural and cultural specimens, including an entire herbarium of preserved NZ plants. This is actually where most of my hebe specimens came from for my research (I extracted DNA from little leaf fragments taken from the original specimens). There are lots of people working behind the scenes, curating the collections and doing research on them, including my excellent collaborator who sent the specimens.