https://parkerhiggins.net/2025/04/10-years-of-pomological-watercolors/

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10 years of pomological watercolors

12 Apr 2025 [tangelo]

Hello Hacker News readers! If you like this blog post, you may be
interested to know that I'm on the job market. If you or your company
is hiring and think I might be a good fit, please be in touch.

A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US
government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological
Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful
and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other
biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s. Through a
handful of FOIA requests I'd learned that the images had been
meticulously digitized and put online for purchase, but that less
than 100 pictures had been sold that way -- not nearly enough to
justify the paywall.

A watercolor of a leaf from an apple tree. There are so many
beautiful pictures in this collection, but in this post I wanted to
highlight some of the weirder ones.

It was a strange rallying call, and certainly feels like it comes
from a different era, but (if I may humbly say so) it worked. Within
a few months, the National Agricultural Library put their
high-resolution scans online, and they remain available to search and
download. It's easy for me to imagine a version of this story where I
declared victory and moved on to the next thing.

Samples of biological specimens, seemingly in test tubes

But that's not what I did! Now that the images were available, I
wanted to add them to Wikimedia Commons. In order to do so, I needed
to create some software that would handle the uploads. This was my
first ever project in Python, and in many ways, the start of my life
as a programmer. The domino effect here is a little mind-boggling for
me.

A tray of sliced and dried persimmons

Emboldened by that foray into coding, I created a Twitter bot to post
through the collection. Social media bots as a medium became pretty
important to me. That account stopped posting when Twitter became X,
approximately, but it continues to this day on Bluesky and Mastodon.
I found other weird opportunities to highlight the collection. I gave
a short talk at the National Archives for Wikicon 2015, made a
visualization video for a concert of carnatic music, and added a
thousand apple cultivars to my favorite collection of datasets. I
made buttons.

Pinback buttons featuring a green 'Primate' apple. I made so many of
these buttons that, ten years later and on the other side of the
country, I still find them in nooks and crannies.

Most exciting to me, though, has been seeing the public collection
flourish as I'd hoped it would. There has been a coffee table book,
an academic exploration, a postcard collection, and high-quality
prints from an art seller. The collection continues to get press
attention -- not just from interviews I did with sites like Mashable
and Morsel, but in Open Culture, Atlas Obscura, even a shout-out from
the New York Times. Just this year it got a delightful write-up by
Kelsey McKinney at Defector, one of my favorites.

A screenshot from a scene in Schitt's Creek. Randomly spotted one of
the paintings in the background of the diner set in Schitt's Creek!

I found the pomological watercolors through my advocacy for the
public domain -- a cause that can sometimes feel a little lonely and
dispiriting. Embracing these artworks, though, has changed my life
for the better in so many ways over the past decade. I don't really
have a big takeaway, and nobody's asking for advice, but: I have been
so grateful that I kept pulling that string and following my
curiosity and interest. I sought out this collection on a lark, and I
have now spent ten years surprised and delighted by what I found.

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