El cuaderno de Blanca Catalán de Ocón: memoria de una naturalista  entre la botánica, las artes y la poesía

Elisa Garrido Moreno

doi:10.51349/veg.2025.1.11

Authors

Elisa Garrido Moreno Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51349/veg.2025.1.11

Keywords:

Art and science, decorative arts, botany, gender studies

Abstract

Blanca Catalán de Ocón y Gayolá (1860-1904) is a name that is beginning to impact in the history of Spain, but whose legacy is yet to be discovered. From her youth, she showed an innate interest in botany and that is why she was designated as «the first Spanish botanist» by the German scientist H.M. Willkomm, director of the Prague Botanical Garden. She lived her youth surrounded by the beauty of nature, scientific knowledge and the good taste for arts and poetry that in every corner of her home situated in an immense valley in the heart of the Sierra de Albarracín. As a result of her research, she composed an herbarium with more than eighty species, some of them still unknown to science. However, the flowers of the valley were for her much more than elements to be scientifically analysed. As for other women naturalists of the 19th century, botany became a source of artistic inspiration, manifested in poems and floral compositions that we collect here today thanks to the research carried out in the private archive preserved by her descendants.

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