The Forest in the Classroom: Sytina’s Russian School Posters and Thomé’s Botanical Plates
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In the autumn of 1910, somewhere in a classroom in the Russian Empire, a teacher unrolled a large educational poster and pinned it to the wall. It showed two trees — the Norway Spruce and the Silver Birch — rendered in the bold, clear imagery of the Tipografiya Tovarishchestva I.D. Sytina, pre-revolutionary Russia’s most important educational publisher. The children looked up at it. They learned the names of the cones, the needles, the seeds. They learned the difference between a conifer and a deciduous tree. They learned, in the way that the object-lesson method intended, by looking at something beautiful.
Sytina and the Russian Educational Poster
Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin (1851–1934) was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of Russian publishing. Born into a peasant family, he built from nothing one of the largest publishing houses in the Russian Empire — producing cheap, accessible books, newspapers, and educational materials for a population that was, for the first time, becoming literate in large numbers.
Sytin’s educational posters — produced by his Tipografiya Tovarishchestva under the name T-va I.D. Sytina — were among the most beautiful educational materials of their era. Combining scientific accuracy with the bold chromolithographic colour of the Art Nouveau period, they brought the natural world into classrooms across the Russian Empire with a visual clarity and aesthetic ambition that no subsequent generation of educational designers has quite matched.
The 1910 poster documenting the Norway Spruce (Picea abies) and Silver Birch (Betula pendula) is a masterpiece of the genre. The two trees — the most characteristic species of the northern European and Russian forest — are shown in complete botanical detail, from root system to crown, from cone to seed, with the pedagogical clarity that made Sytina’s posters essential teaching tools from St Petersburg to Vladivostok.
Thomé and the German Botanical Plate
Twenty-five years earlier, in the German-speaking world, Otto Wilhelm Thomé (1840–1925) was producing a very different kind of botanical document. His Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885) — four volumes documenting the flora of the German-speaking world in hand-coloured engraved plates — was the gold standard of German botanical illustration: meticulous, precise, and extraordinarily beautiful.
Thomé’s plate of Picea abies — the Norway Spruce — documents the tree’s cones, needles, seeds, and reproductive structures with the anatomical precision of a scientist who understood that the most beautiful things in nature are often the most precisely structured. Where Sytina’s poster gives you the tree as a whole, in its forest context, Thomé gives you the tree in its parts — the individual cone scale, the winged seed, the cross-section of the needle — each rendered with the loving attention of a man who had spent his life looking at plants.
Two Traditions, One Tree
Together, Sytina and Thomé offer a complete portrait of the Norway Spruce — the most widely distributed conifer in Europe, the traditional Christmas tree of the German-speaking world, and one of the most ecologically important trees of the boreal forest. One tradition is Russian and pedagogical, the other German and scientific; one is bold and chromolithographic, the other precise and hand-coloured. But both share the same fundamental conviction: that the natural world deserves to be looked at carefully, documented precisely, and made beautiful for the people who need to understand it.
The Norway Spruce has been growing in the forests of Europe for ten thousand years. Sytina and Thomé gave it, between them, two of its finest portraits.
