For months now The New York Times in conjunction with "the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew" (sic) [to be precise, it is "the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew"], has been advertising a series of botanical prints available at nytstore.com--at least weekly. They are, of course, by well-known botanical artists, reproduced at the highest level, and quite pricey, starting at $600 unframed. The ads, running in the Sunday paper, have featured four of the prints in the collection, including two by the famed watercolorist and explorer Margaret Mee: Mormodes buccinator and Gustavia augusta. The first is an orchid, the second in the family Lecythidaceae and totally unrelated.

I can look past (it hurts...) the fact that whoever designed the advertisement capitalized the species epithet (e.g. Mormodes "B"uccinator), which is wrong. What really bugged me is that the labels were flipped--leading any reasonable reader to the wrong conclusion about the subject of each of these pictures.

I love The New York Times. While working on my undergraduate journalism degree it was the pinnacle of every classmate's ambition, the gold standard of the profession. Appear in The New York Times, and you can die a successful writer. With that exalted reputation comes the heavy responsibility to uphold the highest standards (even in your ads).

Lest any reader think I am picking nits--that no one but a plant geek would have known the difference--I offer the following:

1) The Oppenheimer Editions website correctly identifies the plants in each of these prints.

2) I CALLED the Times to inform them of the error and was assured that the proper people would be notified, and... NOTHING. This was last year.

I suspect that there is no class action suit being prepared by print purchasers who thought they were getting Mormodes buccinator and got Gustavia augusta instead...or the reverse. There probably aren't many people changing the decor of their living rooms to match the (wrong) painting.

It's just wrong.

Perhaps, to their inconvenience, they discovered the error in time. Maybe there just aren't too many of these things being sold.

It's doubly perverse (and strange) that Oppenheimer hasn't noticed the faux pas and corrected it. Their reputation is also at risk--perhaps more than the paper's.

I'm all for the dissemination of these wonderful prints. It's just nice to know that you're getting what you think you are. This has gone on too long. Someone should fix it (after all, what could it cost to reset the ad? Someone blew it.) I'm calling Oppenheimer in the morning.  

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Copyright  2006- 2007 by Carlo A. Balistrieri.
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