Three centuries of people who looked closely.
The plates in this notebook are not decoration we bought. Each is a page from a tradition of looking at a plant until you can draw it, and every GIAB dossier begins the same way. Click any plate to open it.
Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen
Franz Eugen Köhler’s three-volume atlas of medicinal plants: 283 chromolithographs, each with the flower, fruit and seed dissected beside the whole plant. It was made for pharmacists who had to recognise what they were selling. Still the clearest botanical teaching plates ever printed.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsCurtis’s Botanical Magazine
William Curtis started it to show gardeners the new plants arriving from the colonies, one hand-coloured plate and a page of text at a time. It has never stopped publishing. Kew still edits it.
Biodiversity Heritage Library · CC BY 2.0 / public domainMaria Sibylla Merian
At 52 she sold her possessions, sailed to Suriname with her daughter and spent two years painting insects on the plants they actually fed on. Nobody in Europe had drawn metamorphosis that way before. She named the plants in the language of the enslaved people who showed them to her.
Public domain · Getty, MIA, British Library via CommonsElizabeth Blackwell · A Curious Herbal
Her husband was in debtors’ prison. She rented rooms opposite the Physic Garden, drew, engraved and hand-coloured five hundred medicinal plants, four a week for 125 weeks, and paid off the debt. The first herbal by a woman published in Europe.
Public domain · Wellcome Collection, Yale Center for British ArtPierre-Joseph Redouté
Botanical painter to Marie Antoinette and then to Joséphine Bonaparte. He perfected colour stipple engraving so the paper’s light shows through the ink. Les Liliacées and Les Roses set the bar for how a single specimen is portrayed against nothing at all.
Public domain · Cleveland Museum of ArtMarianne North
She travelled alone, unfunded, and painted plants where they grew rather than as cut specimens: baobabs in Tanjore, orchids in Borneo, redwoods in California. Then she paid for a gallery at Kew to hold all 832 paintings. It is still hung exactly as she left it.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew · public domainCompany School
Indian artists trained in Mughal miniature painting, commissioned by East India Company surgeons and botanists. English watercolour on English paper, Indian precision. Most are unsigned; Vishnupersaud and Gorachand are among the few we can name.
Public domain · via CommonsAnonymous watercolours
Studies by unknown hands, kept because they are accurate. The flowering stem, the root, the fruit in section. This is how most botanical knowledge was actually recorded.
Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0Joris Hoefnagel
A miniaturist working on parchment two centuries before botany became a science, already putting flower and insect together on one page.
Public domainThe herbarium sheet
Pressed, dried, mounted, labelled with species, place, date and collector. Every plate on this page began as one of these. So does every GIAB dossier.
MNHN Luxembourg · CC BY 4.0