Art Panels: The Thread of Life, a Botanical History

Artist: John Maggard
Concept:  Dan Gladish with help from his friends, May 2005

Original design. Click the thumbnails below to take a closer look at John Maggard's original design of each panel.

Final artwork. View photographs of the final artwork.

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	Panel #1:  This image represents life in Ohio during the Pennsylvanian Epoch of the Carboniferous Period of geological history (about 320-290 million years ago).  During this time Ohio was near the equator, and much of the area is thought to have been covered by warm, shallow seas and estuaries where trilobites (the official Ohio State Fossil) may have been found in waters surrounded by swampy areas that were dominated by seedless vascular plants often much larger than their modern counterparts: horsetails, club mosses, and ferns.  It would probably not have been unusual to encounter a Meganeura, an ancestor of dragonflies that had a wingspan of around 70 cm (about 28 in).
	Panel #2:  This image represents life in Ohio during the late prehistoric, Mississipian Period (850-1500 AD) in Midwestern North America.  This anthropological period was prior to the changes caused as a result of the influx of European people into North America.  South Ohio landscapes were dominated by vast forests of hickory, oak, maple, blue ash, and many other hardwood species interrupted in a few places in the west by tallgrass prairie areas.  It would probably not have been unusual to encounter a Libellula deplanata, a now rare dragonfly.  This was the land of the Fort Ancient mound-building culture.
	Panel #3:  Using only hand-tools, pioneers of European and African ancestry dramatically transformed Ohio in the early 19th Century by clearing most of its forest and prairie areas and putting them to the plow.  This led eventually to large-scale mechanical farming as practiced today.  This image represents life in Ohio during this period, which has come to be dominated by corn (Zea mays) and soybeans (Glycine max) in most rural areas.  It would not be unusual to see Gomphus graslinellus, a common midwest dragonfly, patrolling farm-fields here for an insect meal.

 

 

 

 

 

Paleological Scene	Pre-Columbian Scene	Agronomic Scene