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.
Ferdinand Bauer (#12) kept the whole plant out of the field page altogether and wrote only colour numbers. Ehret does the opposite: he puts the parts, the notes and the plant on one sheet so the reader can check one against another without turning anything over.
Try it: take a flower apart on a table, draw each part where it lay, and add a note beside it. Then draw the whole flower on a small overlapping slip in a corner, as though it were an afterthought.
By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI