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The publisher John Norton, who was the Queen's Printer, approached Gerard regarding a possible English translation of Dodoens' popular herbal, Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (1583).This was a Latin version of an earlier work in Flemish by Dodoens, his Cruydeboeck (Herb Book) which had already been translated into English by Henry Lyte, under the name A Niewe Herball in 1578 and had proved popular. Gerard was not Norton's first choice, the translation having originally been commissioned from Dr Robert Priest, a member of the London College of Physicianswho had died untimely. Although Gerard acknowledges Priest's role, he implies that he died prior to commencing the work. As curator of the College garden, he would have been familiar with Priest, and his work. The completed book appears to incorporate much of Priest's work, together with his own completion of the text in the form of annotations from his own garden and for the first time, some North American plants. For instance, the first description of the potato in English appeared in this work, although he mistakenly believed it came from Virginia rather than South America (see illustration). He then incorporated as-yet-unpublished material from his friend, L'Obel and also Clusius and rearranged the work to more closely follow and utilise L'Obel's scheme from his 1570 Stirpium adversaria nova. It is thought this was to disguise the original source.

Books & significant catalogues

• Justine Kurland: Spirit West (Coromandel, 2000)
• Another Girl, Another Planet (Lawrence Rubin Greenberg / Van Doren Fine Art, 2001)
• Old Joy (Artspace, 2004) ISBN 1-891273-05-1
• The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip

Kurland first gained public notice with her work in the group show Another Girl, Another Planet (1999), which displayed her large c-print staged tableau pictures of neo-romantic landscapes inhabited by young adolescent girls, half-sprites, half juvenile delinquents.

As landscapes she chose the 'secret places' of late childhood; wasteland on the edges of suburbia, 'owned' only by a feral nature and unsupervised children. Her limited-edition book Spirit West (2000) featured similar work on a more ambitious scale. In early 2001 Kurland spent several months in New Zealand, where she created ([1]) similar work with schoolgirls there.

In her show Community, Skyblue (2002), Kurland turned to documenting the utopian communes of Virginia and California, highlighting the unworldly aspirations of the communards by having them appear naked in her pictures and showing them as only distant figures in their landscape. In 2003 she had European solo shows Golden Dawn (London) and Welcome Home (Vienna), based around these series of commune images.

Her latest book, Old Joy (2004) turns to men. She shows visionaries trekking naked into the wilderness, where they undergo spiritual experiences. In her 2004 show Songs of Experience she explored medieval and Biblical imagery. In 2005 she had a solo show in Japan.

Kurland's work also appears on the cover and liner notes of French electronic/shoegaze group M83's 2004 album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, as well as the covers of the EP releases for this album.

In an article in ArtForum (April 2000) she talked of her inspirations:

"I'm always thinking about painting: nineteenth-century English picturesque landscapes and the utopian ideal, genre paintings, and also Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. I started going to museums at an early age, but my imagery is equally influenced by illustrations from the fairy tales I read as a child."

Outside of the art world press, she has been profiled in The New York Times, Vogue and ELLE.

In 2014 selections from her work Highway Kind were published in the Aperture book The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip.

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Terry Evans (born 1944, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American Photographer based in Chicago IL.