Ink and Leaf
Botanical and natural history drawing, from Merian's plates to field sketchbooks.
Merian's plates (#1) were books, but the Royal Collection holds luxury sheets of them on vellum, like "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" (item #58). The Trust's note says she inked parts of her etched plate and pressed vellum against it while wet, so mostly the insects transferred, and the rest was painted by hand, probably with her daughters' help. Because she moved the butterflies between copies, no two sheets share a composition. …
Georg Dionysius Ehret's "Characters of flowers" (#50, V&A) is a sheet 55 cm tall that does two jobs at once: dissected flower parts, each with its note beside it, and in one corner a pair of drawn pages that overlap as if pinned there, carrying the whole plant. Ehret drew it, etched it and published it himself. …
Elizabeth Blackwell (#31, via Nicky Monroe at the RHS Lindley Library) drew each plant for A Curious Herbal from live specimens in the Apothecaries' Garden, and put several views and growth stages of it into a single picture. Merian's plate (#1) does the same with a plant and an insect's life cycle: the stages sit side by side though they happened weeks apart. …
Sean Vidal Edgerton (#25) says that when a specimen arrives broken, he rebuilds the missing flower, fruit or cross-section anyway, because describing a new species needs every part on the plate. His sequence is slow: hours of looking, geometric blocking, tracing-paper drafts a curator signs off, then ink on vellum. …
Lizzie Harper (#23) says a leaf's veins and shadow, plus the colours of a couple of flowers, are enough for her to rebuild a whole plant later, even out of bloom. Bauer (#12) went further: numbers for colours in the field, and a plate years afterward.
Both keep the field page small on purpose. What it records is what the later drawing cannot invent.
Try it: sit with one plant for twenty minutes and make a page that holds only what you could not reconstruct from memory. Leave it a week, then draw the whole plant from that page alone, and see what you wish you had written down.
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