- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, a lineup of local stories that celebrate art and nature.

An exhibition where art, science and nature collide.

- Gives a perspective of how many levels that nature can give us and how much we are connected to nature.

So scientists are artists in themselves and what they produce.

And we put that on display here.

- The art of gardening.

- I love to create things.

I love creating new landscapes from nothing and watching it grow.

I really get enjoyment seeing people come in and actually enjoy the work that my staff and I do.

- Birds etched with incredible detail.

- They're extremely, extremely detailed because he goes out into the field and he studies feather patterns, leg patterns, like, for example, the sandhill crane that he just did.

He spent 40 hours drawing those legs.

- And learn the art of animal rehabilitation.

- You have to figure out if there's a piece of a puzzle that you can put together to actually determine what their initial injury is.

It's almost like creating a piece of art.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

[music] Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is WEDU Arts Plus, located in the Warehouse Arts District of St.

Petersburg.

The Wild Space Gallery aims to raise awareness about conservation issues in Florida.

One exhibit explores the relationship between nature and humanity in timeless art, science and nature at Archbold Biological Station.

[music] - The best part of my job is being able to see the things that would otherwise be mysterious.

The natural world is cryptic.

It's right under our noses, but we often don't understand what we're seeing.

And I love trying to understand what we're seeing.

And I love to try to be close to the things that are mysterious to us.

[music] Archbold Biological Station is an independent science organization.

It's a field station that is based in Highlands County, Florida.

It's designed to host long term ecological research.

So by long term I mean decades long.

Artists, scientists, educators come from all over the world to Archbold to try and understand and get a glimpse of the very unique, highly biodiverse ecosystems that Archbold hosts and understands and collects data on.

[music] - The Wild Space Gallery was opened by the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.

The foundation is a collaborative mission to save the Florida Wildlife Corridor, so the corridor is 18 million acres of connected landscape and waterways that support wildlife and us people here in the state of Florida.

- Wild Space Gallery is established to really, I guess, to bolster and get out the message of the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

- From our beginnings.

We have incorporated storytelling and also artwork.

Our founder, Carlton Ward Jr., is a National Geographic photographer and through his images, he has and continues to raise awareness of the wildlife corridor.

And so here at the Wild Space Gallery, we hope to bring that piece of art and storytelling that has been the true vein of our values and our mission from the beginning, and spread it to the people to bring more awareness to the corridor.

- There's a strong relationship between science and art, and so in some ways that's the inextricable link between science and art.

That creative mindset is what fuels both scientists and artists.

And often you find those skill sets and those sensitivities in the same person.

And Archbold's very lucky that we attract those types.

[music] [applause] The title of this exhibit is, "Timeless: Art, Science and Nature," at Archbold Biological Station, and each piece connects to that in some way.

- I'd have to say that my favorite piece is the Ant Lab, which it sort of reproduces the workspace of Dr.

Mark Deyrup, who is an entomologist and has been studying ants in Florida since 1982.

And so his area is I could never decide if it was an artist's studio or a scientist laboratory.

- We have microscopes and you can see the little hairs on the ants.

It brings in the science down to a really small level.

And then you have the woodcut prints that show the landscape and it pulls you back.

It pulls you in and it pulls you back.

And the farther you stand away from it, the more 3D it looks.

Then we have the people in the field too, that do the art science and are in nature.

So it combines all three, and it gives a perspective of how many levels that nature can give us and how much we are connected to nature.

So scientists are artists in themselves and what they produce.

And we put that on display here.

[music] - A lot of different kind of artists and scientists have worked at Archbold over the years.

One, I think, of the most unusual would be Evelyn Geiser.

And Evelyn is a professor.

She's a limnologist.

Limnologist means one who studies freshwater.

There's a lake at Archbold called Lake Annie, and so over a year's time, she studied the temperatures in Lake Annie, and she is also a classically trained musician.

So she looked at those data points and she said, huh, that looks kind of like a musical score.

So basically, she created a musical score from using the data points.

It's curiosity, it's passion for figuring out what's going on.

It's a leap of imagination.

So I think that scientists and artists have that very much in common.

Evelyn's work sort of exemplifies what happened there.

- Archbold is embedded in the corridor and the values of that landscape and the values of the people in that landscape are sort of distilled in the art that you see here.

- What we do here at the gallery is, is try to connect people through art to nature, no matter where they're from.

- But our hope is that you can get that little boost of inspiration and curiosity to take you out to the field, to try to experience it.

[music] Learn more at floridawildlifecorridor.org /wild-space-gallery.

Spending time in a garden is like stepping into a beautiful work of art.

Let's head to Lakeland to visit the urban oasis that is Hollis Garden.

[music] [music] - Hollis Garden is located in downtown Lakeland off Lake Mirror and Hollis Garden was a donation from Mark and Lynn Hollis.

Mark Hollis was president of Public Super Market from 1984 to 1996, and him and his wife, Lynn, both donated $1 million to build and construct the garden.

[music] My name is Kevin Polk, and I oversee Hollis Garden and I've been here for over 20 years.

[applause] [music] Hollis Garden is a 1.2-acre garden.

It's a neoclassical garden with neoclassical architecture.

It's also a sculpture garden.

[music] [music] [music] Hollis garden opened up on December 8th of 2000.

So an architect by the name of Jay Hood designed the garden, and he designed it in a creative way.

The garden tells a story about Florida's history.

And it starts up in our primitive Florida area, which is our native section, where we have native plants of central, northern and south Florida.

As it flows from primitive Florida gets to our agrarian age, our agriculture era, which consists of our vegetable room, our tour rooms, our fruit and spice room, and our fruit orchard.

But whenever you leave primitive Florida, you'll go into our historical tree section, which is our Trees of Americana section.

And in that section we have FDR's dogwood came from his home.

We have Edgar Allan Poe's Sugarberry tree, which came from his estate.

We have Helen Keller's Water Oak, which came from her home.

And we also have a Martin Luther King Jr.

sycamore tree which came from his church.

We have Patrick Henry's Osage Orange, which came from the Lewis and Clark expedition over 200 years ago.

[music] We also have a butterfly section, succulent section.

And my favorite is we have probably one of the best cycad collections around.

A cycad is a plant that's prehistoric.

It dates all the way back to the dinosaurs, and they're very, very rare.

[music] I love to create things.

I love creating new landscapes from nothing and watching it grow.

I really get enjoyment seeing people come in and actually enjoy the work that my staff and I do.

People coming and taking their photos with our photo-op areas that we've created.

[music] - What brings me here today is to take my pictures for my queens.

[music] I came from my mama, so it was like, I think like an hour drive.

It's a really pretty place.

If you want to take pictures, I suggest you come here.

Like for a pretty scenery.

[music] - Gardening, to me is kind of like a visual art.

You got to think about the colors, the texture of the leaves when putting stuff together, how it's going to grow and what it's going to look like in its mature state because it changes all the time.

It changes with the seasons.

It can change throughout the day.

The way that a certain plant looks because of the lighting, the sun hitting it, and everybody's going to get something different out of it when they see it.

[music] - Today, my friend and I came over to take some graduation pictures for my mom and dad so they can send them out to our family.

Actually, my college did like a little film project over here, and I found out from my friends and I saw it actually in their little video.

And I was like, that is the most gorgeous place ever.

So I thought about it and this is, you know, why I wanted to take some pictures for my graduation.

[music] - Well, Hurricane Ian really destroyed probably 60% of all of our large trees.

It took us about 3 to 4 days just to clean it up, and we're still cleaning it up today.

[music] When I came in the morning after the hurricane, I saw all the destruction and my heart just sunk right into my stomach.

I planted these trees when they were babies and watched them grow and mature.

And when you see them falling over, it just changes the whole look of the garden.

All your hard work goes into something and it's just a it's devastating to see.

[music] [music] I've always had a green thumb.

Growing up, I used to garden with my great grandma and her front yard.

I used to go out in front of her trailer and we used to plant caladium bulbs and, and she would plant amaryllis and flowers and stuff.

So I kind of always enjoyed it.

[music] Hollis Garden, it's a public garden.

It's a free garden.

So it doesn't cost anything for people to visit and see.

It's a blessing for us to have something like this in Lakeland.

It's a very special place.

[music] - For more, visit lakelandgov.net and enter the search term, "Hollis Garden."

Ybor City resident John Costin creates complex life-size images of birds in his 120 year old studio, using an etching process that dates back hundreds of years.

His artwork captures the beauty and nuance of these natural wonders.

[music] - One question I get a lot from people when they see my work.

They look at it and say, why do you do etchings?

Why not do a painting and do reproductions?

Why not do that?

And I tell them they're not the same.

There are certain visual qualities that etchings have that these other processes don't have.

- Most people do not know what etchings are and what is involved.

So I just say, well, he's kind of like a modern day Audubon.

What Audubon did with plates, with birds.

John makes his birds life size.

They're all hand-painted.

They're extremely, extremely detailed because he goes out into the field and he studies feather patterns, leg patterns.

Like, for example, the sandhill crane that he just did.

He spent 40 hours drawing those legs.

So I would tell people, if you want something very detailed and bright and beautiful that you need to go see my husband's work.

- My favorite thing about the work that John does is being able to just see him create it.

It is incredible to me to watch something start as an idea and just watch that idea come to life.

It is watching something magnificent unfold.

It's like this magical side of art that I get to bear witness to.

[music] - We're in Ybor City.

This is sort of the outskirts of Ybor.

This building was constructed probably about 1904, 1905, and this building was a dry goods store.

In the late 70s.

I was an electrician and I had a great career there if I wanted to go that direction.

But I always had an interest in art and went to school at USF.

And while I was there, one of the classes I had taken was printmaking.

[music] - I met John 24 years ago and it still blows me away the things that this man can do that I've never seen anybody else do.

And when other printmakers see his work, they are overwhelmed that he's using, you know, large plates, making birds, life size, multiple plates and hand coloring them as well.

So I'm as big a fan, I believe.

- I like large scale etchings.

I like the intensity of them.

Something you rarely see.

Most artists that do etchings, they're of this scale small, small scale because they're so intense to, to work on all the technical things that you have to do to do a plate that size to work large is much more challenging.

- One of the most interesting things that I have learned working here, and being a watercolor artist and assistant, is color theory.

The way that John knows color so intricately blows me away.

Just on top of all of his other skills, the colors that he uses down to the shades of black are so specific so that they really create a depth, a dimension to these birds that brings them to life, that really makes them pop off of the paper.

[music] - I look at a lot of these pieces as a scientific experiment, where you have a series of variables, and they all have to be completed just right to get the right result.

So I document everything.

That way somebody can come behind me that I've worked with and trained and can achieve the same results, as long as they adhere to my notes that I take.

[music] - With every bird that we work on.

John and Janet share their knowledge and interesting things about them.

Most of them are life sized, so I get to see these birds up close in his etchings.

So my knowledge of birds is really grown.

- My interest in birds started when I was young.

Our family lived in Blue Ridge, Georgia.

We had a farm there.

Because of that, I was exposed to a lot of different birds in the area and that piqued my interest.

When we moved to Florida, I had the chance to see a lot of these larger species of birds that created an even stronger interest in birds.

Seeing these up front, close and personal.

[music] - It's kind of weird to be emotional about birds because before I met John, you know, I didn't know.

I did not know much about birds.

- I feel that when you look at a piece with just one subject like that, you empathize with it more so you're not just a distant observer.

You're there in that bird's space.

It takes on a character personality.

One of my goals is for the viewer to connect with that subject matter, and that's one of the reasons why I just use one bird.

I'm hoping that maybe indirectly from them connecting with that bird, they might have more of a care about the environment they live in.

[music] - It amazes me some people will say, oh well, is it just a print because they see that it's signed and numbered?

No, it's a handmade piece of art.

There's nothing done with a camera or computer.

It's all handmade.

It's fine art and it's amazing.

[music] - In addition to my own work, I've been collecting antique prints for 30 years.

I have an interest in how other naturalists approach that, you know.

How did they why did they do it?

How did they do it?

And I feel that I want to add to that with my work.

That's one of my goals.

Knowing all these things that have happened before me and then adding my own thumbprint on there, a contemporary view.

[music] - To see more, visit costingraphics.com.

This segment was produced by students at St.

Petersburg College in partnership with WEDU at Owl's Nest Sanctuary for Wildlife in Odessa, Florida.

Founder and director Chris Porter, along with volunteers, worked closely with sick and injured animals.

Find out why they consider rehabilitation to be an art form.

[music] - I'm the director and founder of sanctuary.

Um, I'm actually a retired zoologist.

I've worked with animals pretty much my whole life since I was eight years old.

One way or another, went to college, got a zoology degree, interned for Busch Gardens when the pandas were here and pretty much never looked back.

I left college and went to them and worked 11 years in the animal nursery, but left because my first daughter was born premature.

She was an emergency C-section, and it was either going to be the little 4 pound munchkin or my career.

So I did leave, and 14 years later, I got conned into one of my zookeeper friends telling me I was wasting my talent.

Come raise some baby squirrels and bunnies.

And within three months, Owl's Nest was founded.

I had all the permits that you need to do to start this.

[music] - So there's an art to everything.

I believe in life.

And when you're treating an injured animal, when you're looking at them and you're evaluating them and you're having to get creative in some instances where you have to figure out if there's a piece of a puzzle that you can put together to actually determine what their initial injury is.

It's almost like creating a piece of art where you're doing all of your triaging, you're evaluating the entire animal, and then you're putting the puzzle pieces back together.

It's just like painting a picture.

- Yeah, this is a red-shouldered hawk that came in yesterday.

Um, I've got a large patch of blood on the chest, which usually signifies that somebody possibly shot him.

We have a huge rash of people shooting birds lately.

Not lately.

Ever since I've done this, but in the last couple of months, it has definitely ramped up.

- Medicine in general is an art.

Um, when?

When, when doctors are going to school.

It's the art of medicine.

And when we have to do it, it's the same concept with the wildlife.

It is the art of the medicine and ultimately it's the medicine that's healing them.

- So he'll get all this.

I don't need to wrap the wing.

It's pretty decent in, um, what it looks like.

Doesn't look like.

So I don't need to wrap anything.

You know, you're going to bite something.

Bite that.

Thank you.

You have to have a touch with animals.

In other words, you can't be a nervous wreck.

You can't be moving quick.

People that raise and do animals, they have a way about them.

And while I could never be like my husband in the computer AV world, I could never do what he does.

He could never do what I do.

So, you know, obviously I use syringes and, and there's so many things, bottles and things like that.

But I think the most important thing that I use is, is my background and my, my know how of, of what an animal needs by looking at it.

[laughter] - Now.

- So the habitats is, is all Chris.

Um, she does a fantastic job in that, based on her past experience and knowing the animals and the types of environments that they need to be in, um, enrichment is actually very important, even for, for wildlife that you're rehabbing.

You want it to be as much as a natural setting as it can be.

Um, for the animal to cause the least amount of stress.

Um, and, and when, when, when Chris envisions the habitat, she thinks back to her to the days of when she actually cared for these animals prior to, to starting the sanctuary.

The main thing is that I like to try to spread the message about.

And this is why I'm, I'm doing; I do the community outreach is to help educate is the human impact and what happens to our wildlife.

A lot of it is caused by humans.

Um, a lot of it is caused by trash, um, car hits and, and, um, and when that happens, it breaks our heart because a lot of times some of those injuries are non-recoverable for these animals.

So the big message is, you know.

Everybody, please take care of our environment.

We only have one.

Um, and we only have so many of these precious animals.

[music] - Discover more at owlsnest sanctuaryforwildlife.com.

And that wraps it up for this episode of WEDU Arts Plus.

To view more, visit wedu.org/artsplus or follow us on social.

I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.