Botanical illustration occupies a remarkable position in the history of image-making. It is simultaneously a scientific practice and an artistic one, and the best of it achieves something neither pure science nor pure art achieves alone. A botanical illustration must be accurate: taxonomically precise, showing the correct number of petals, the exact form of the stamens, the characteristic shape of the leaf margin. And it must be beautiful, in a way that honours the plant and makes the image worth looking at for its own sake.

That double obligation has produced some of the most sustained and extraordinary drawing in the Western tradition.

The herbal tradition

The earliest botanical illustrations were made in the service of practical medicine. The herbal, a book describing the medicinal properties of plants, was one of the most important categories of text in the ancient and medieval world, and its illustrations were guides to identification. This is what the plant looks like, so you gather the right one and avoid the wrong one.

Early herbal illustrations were often stylised rather than realistic: the plant rendered as a type, expressing the concept rather than recording a specimen. That stylisation had practical limits, since a schematic illustration can lead to dangerous misidentification, and as the tradition developed into the Renaissance the illustrations became increasingly naturalistic, driven by the same empirical impulse transforming all of European thought.

And this is where the site's plant material connects. Almost every plant in the Plants & Trees database appears in one herbal or another, drawn by somebody working from a specimen in front of them. Grieve's A Modern Herbal of 1931, cited across this site, sits at the end of that line.

Elizabeth Blackwell

The Scottish contribution to the herbal tradition is a single extraordinary book and it deserves more attention than it gets.

Elizabeth Blackwell, born in Aberdeen around 1707, found herself in London with her husband Alexander in debtors' prison. She needed money and she had drawing ability, and she discovered that the physicians of the Chelsea Physic Garden wanted an illustrated herbal covering the newer plants arriving from the Americas.

Between 1737 and 1739 she produced A Curious Herbal: five hundred plates, in weekly parts. She drew every one from living specimens at the Physic Garden, engraved every plate herself, and hand-coloured them. Alexander, from prison, supplied the Latin names and the medical text.

It worked. The book sold, it freed him, and it remained in use as a working reference for the best part of a century.

It is worth pausing on what that involved. Drawing, engraving and colouring are three separate skilled trades, and she did all three, five hundred times, to a professional standard, under financial duress, as a woman in a field almost entirely closed to women.

Alexander, it should be said, went on to Sweden and was executed there in 1747 for involvement in a political conspiracy. She had rather better judgement than he did.

The great florilegia

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the golden age of the florilegium: the elaborate book of botanical illustrations, typically produced for aristocratic patrons, combining scientific documentation with luxurious display.

The botanical gardens of the period required documentation. Pisa was founded in 1544 and Padua in 1545, with Leiden following in 1590, and the artists employed to record their collections worked at the highest level of skill.

Georg Dionysius Ehret, a German artist working largely in Britain, produced illustrations for Linnaeus's systematic botany and for the collectors and nurserymen of eighteenth-century England, setting a standard of precision and elegance that shaped everything after him. His plates show the whole plant, clearly lit against white, with every diagnostic feature visible.

The partnership between Joseph Banks, botanist on Cook's Endeavour voyage of 1768 to 1771, and Sydney Parkinson, the artist documenting the specimens, produced one of the great bodies of botanical illustration anywhere. Parkinson died of dysentery in 1771 before the voyage ended, having completed around nine hundred and fifty drawings, and Banks' Florilegium was not published in full until the 1980s.

Watercolour as medium

The medium of choice is watercolour, with gouache where opacity is needed. Watercolour's transparency, its capacity to build luminosity through layered dilute washes, and its ability to do both broad wash and fine detail suit the subject exactly: the translucency of a petal, the wax of a leaf, the texture of bark and root.

The technique is specific. Layers of transparent wash, gradually intensifying colour and deepening shadow, with fine detail added last with a very small brush. The illustrator typically begins with a detailed pencil drawing establishing precise contours, then works wet on dry, letting each layer dry completely before the next.

At its best the effect is a quality of illumination that is genuinely extraordinary: the flowers lit from within, petals translucent as glass, scientific precision and beauty arriving together.

Why it survived photography

Botanical illustration was not replaced by plant photography, and the reason is instructive.

A photograph records a specific plant, at a specific moment, in specific light, including whatever is wrong with that individual specimen: the chewed leaf, the shadow falling across the diagnostic feature, the flower at the wrong stage.

An illustration shows the plant as it characteristically is. The typical leaf. The diagnostic features that separate this species from its close relatives, arranged so all are visible. And it can show flower, bud, seed, root and section together in one image, which no photograph can do.

For identification, a good illustration beats a good photograph, which is why field guides still use them.

The contemporary tradition

The Society of Botanical Artists, founded in 1985, supports a community working in a line that runs unbroken from the Renaissance, and its annual exhibition is one of the finest regular shows of observational drawing anywhere.

In Scotland, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh holds a major collection of botanical art and runs one of the leading courses in the discipline. If you want to learn this properly, that is where to go.

Sources

  • Blackwell, E. (1737–1739). A Curious Herbal. Digitised in full and free at the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Wellcome Collection.
  • Blunt, W. & Stearn, W. T. (1994). The Art of Botanical Illustration. Antique Collectors' Club. The standard history.
  • Saunders, G. (1995). Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration. Victoria and Albert Museum.
  • Sherwood, S. (2001). A Passion for Plants: Contemporary Botanical Masterworks.
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library, hundreds of thousands of out-of-copyright botanical plates, free and high resolution. The single best resource, and the one recommended for illustrating this site.
  • Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, collections, and the Botanical Illustration courses.
  • Society of Botanical Artists.
  • Chelsea Physic Garden, where Blackwell drew.
  • Grieve, M. (1931). A Modern Herbal. Full text.

Cross-reference: slynkycat Plants & Trees Reference Database.

Related: [Drawing from Observation]; [Liminal Plants]; [Crotal, Woad and Madder]; [The Machair]