Art Library / Botanicals
Botanicals
Flowers, ferns, herbs and fungi, from the plates that recorded them for study rather than decoration.
19 collections, 3,720 pieces in total. Pick a collection to see the art inside it.
Engraving
Broad frond with long pinnae
From Edward Joseph Lowe, Ferns: British and Exotic , scan page 19
View this pieceBrowse the collections
Start with a subject or a set of historical plates.
Botanical
Flowers, ferns, leaves and wreaths traced from nineteenth-century botanical plates.
Fungi
Mushrooms, toadstools, bracket fungi and lichens from mycological iconographies.
Apothecary
Herbals, retorts, phials and remedies. The old pharmacy, from Culpeper and Blackwell through to laboratory glass.
Flowers
Botanical colour plates of garden and wild flowers, drawn in full bloom from life.
Leaves
Leaf and foliage studies printed in autumn colour, ready to scatter across a panel.
Herbals and Remedies
Medicinal plants cut for the apothecary, scanned from Blackwell's Curious Herbal and its kin.
Botanical in Colour
Colour botany plates: the whole plant with root, leaf and flower, painted from the specimen.
Fungi Plates
Caps, gills and spore drawings from the great mycological atlases, painted plate by plate.
Motifs and moods
Follow a more specific object, detail or feeling.
Ferns
Fern and frond studies from the Victorian fern books, at the height of the pteridomania.
Grasses and Sedges
Grass, sedge and cereal plates: the quiet half of botany, all stem and seed head.
Kitchen Garden and Orchard
Seed-catalogue vegetables, orchard fruit and pomona plates, drawn to sell a crop rather than classify it.
Roses
Roses drawn from the plant in the herbals, and flattened into badges in the heraldry books.
Lilies and Fleurs-de-lis
The lily as a growing plant and the fleur-de-lis it hardened into on banners and shields.
Poppies
Poppy heads and seed capsules, which the Art Nouveau draughtsmen drew more than almost anything else.
Chrysanthemums
The kiku of Japanese crest work next to the garden chrysanthemum of the Western flower plates.
Thistles and Clover
Thistle heads, shamrocks and clover leaves, drawn both as plants and as national badges.
Vines and Ivy
Climbing stems drawn to run along a border: ivy, grapevine and loose trailing tendrils.
Mushrooms and Toadstools
Caps, gills and spotted toadstools, lifted from the mycology plates.
Cones and Seed Heads
What a plant leaves behind: fir cones, seed capsules and the woody heads of a banksia.
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