This week’s Friday Flora is not from the collection of the Department of Botany as regularly featured, but comes from the documentary nature photography of Thomas Sadler Roberts. Though birds are Roberts’s most common subject, several examples of flora and family life can be found within Roberts’s glass plate negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History collection.

The following images portray an outing to Lake Minnetonka, where it appears that Roberts and family (to include his daughter Catharine) spent a day observing water lilies, circa 1900:

– “Lotus lily pond, looking toward open water,” Lake Minnetonka

– “Lotus lily, rowboat,” Lake Minnetonka.

1) “Lotus lily against lattice,” Lake Minnetonka.
2) “Catharine with lotus leaf,” Lake Minnetonka.