Description

This psychedelic poster was illustrated by Elmer W. Smith and digitally recomposed by Wendy Hollender.

Available as giclee fine art prints, printed by Wendy in her studio on acid-free watercolor paper or canvas with archival inks.

Prints available in one size: 24″ wide x 22″ high.

FRAME NOT INCLUDED but can be purchased separately! We recommend these Effortless Wooden Frames for easy hanging of both paper and canvas prints. (Select size Large (26″ long) for this poster.)

Here’s the story – Back in 2003 when Wendy was just becoming a botanical illustrator, she had a blurb in Country Living Magazine. A few months later, she got a letter from someone at a pharmaceutical company who was searching for a specific poster of hallucinogenic plants. The poster went along with a children’s book, published in 1976. A Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants was written by Richard Evans Schultes, a famous ethnobotanist at Harvard who studied indigenous people and hallucinogenic plants all over the world, and illustrated by Elmer W. Smith.

She was confident that she could find this poster for him, so she wrote to many botanical gardens and universities with botany departments, starting with Harvard. Harvard wrote back that they had had a poster, but it was stolen from their library case! So Wendy kept searching and asking different institutions until finally someone put her in touch with the University of Wisconsin. They didn’t have the full poster, but they did have 12 scans that could be pieced together into the poster. This was back in 2003, before Photoshop made things easy, but Wendy got the scans and spent a lot of time seaming them together into the complete poster.

Wendy didn’t want to infringe on any rights by selling this poster, illustrated by Elmer W. Smith, so she went searching for more answers. She contacted the families of Richard Schultes and Elmer Smith and the copyright office in Washington D.C. but had no luck finding out who owned the rights. Finally Wendy contacted the society of illustrators and was told that since no one else was interested in the rights, she could print it. She sold a few copies of this poster, but as her career took off, she forgot about it… until recently!

Wendy got a message from someone who had seen her mushroom paintings, asking for a print of hallucinogenic mushrooms for their husband, a psychologist working with psychedelics. Many people are finding success with psychedelic treatments these days, so it feels like a good time to make this print available again!