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.
Set beside Lizzie Harper's sketchbook pages (#23), where a leaf's veins and a couple of flower colours are enough to rebuild a plant later, it looks like the same job from two ends. The sketchbook keeps what can't be reconstructed. The plate is where the rest gets reconstructed, with someone checking.
Try it: draw a plant from a pressed or wilted specimen, mark in the margin which parts you had to invent, then ask someone who knows the plant to check those.
By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI