Photographer Page

Jonathan Blair

A man inspects scores of orchid hybrids at his nursery in Homestead, Florida. A story in the July 2002 issue told how flowering plants came to be.

A gardener at London's Kew Gardens uses a lily pad as a makeshift umbrella. Removing the leaf allows room for growth, as the largest species of water lily can go from bud to five feet wide in just three days.

In Pakistan's Hunza Valley, people sort apricots to dry in the sun. A story in the March 1994 issue told of the ways the construction of the Karakoram Highway connected the otherwise remote region to the rest of the world.

At the Eden Project in Cornwall, morning mist covers 4,500 different plant species. The tourist attraction's tropical biome is the largest indoor rainforest in the world.

Photographer Jonathan Blair, his wife Arlene, and a guest are silhouetted by gas lamps as they pose in the openings of a cave home in Cappadocia, Turkey. The couple lived in the cave for a month, following in the footsteps of habitants who have settled here for centuries.

An article in the January 1976 issue praised Sweden's society and politics, including its health care system. Here, new parents meet their baby after a natural delivery in a public maternity hospital.

Hangliders soar over Yosemite Valley in California's Yosemite National Park, in this photo from the January 1985 issue. The thrillseekers were treated to a 20-minute glide over the valley.

Tourists in Yellowstone National Park stop to photograph an American black bear in 1972.

Woolly mammoths, long-buried in permafrost—until now—are valued for their “ice ivory.” When carved, their tusks are hard to distinguish from those of elephants.

Like their cousins the dinosaurs, pterosaurs stand out as one of evolution's great success stories. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 215 million years ago, and thrived for 150 million years before going extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. Uncontested in the air, pterosaurs colonised all continents and evolved a vast array of shapes and sizes. This specimen, found in Italy, is Eudimorphodon ranzii, with a wingspan of about three feet (one meter) and 114 tiny teeth packed into its jaws.