Plant inspired book covers from the British Library’s dusty archives. Age denotes all works are now in the Public Domain. For more, see their Flickr photostream.
Formal gardens are nice, but never can they equal, much less rival, Nature’s wild gardens. Nothing person-made comes close to being as gracious and triumphant as an alpine meadow in flower. Public domain artworks from Alpine flowers and gardens, painted and described by G. Flemwell (published London, A. & C. Black, 1910) express these sentiments …
The following Public Domain artworks are from the book Familiar Indian Flowers by Lena Lowis published by Thacker and Co., Bombay, 1878. While they may have been familiar flowers in India at this time to British colonialists, not all are natives e.g Poinsettia. Those with ‘indica‘ as the species epithet (the second part of the latin name) …
Last Friday was the 1869 collection of illustrations from The Florist And Pomologist: A Pictorial Monthly Magazine Of Flowers, Fruits, And General Horticulture, today we give you more free botanical art from the 1873 collection. Published by the Journal of Horticulture, London and digitised by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, these works are in the Public Domain. We include 14 intensely coloured …
Free botanical art from The Florist And Pomologist: A Pictorial Monthly Magazine Of Flowers, Fruits, And General Horticulture, published by the Journal of Horticulture, London in 1869. Now in the Public Domain it has been digitised for us by the wonderful Biodiversity Heritage Library. This collection includes 12 intensely coloured plates with plant names and other …
The following are a selection of beautiful plant-inspired shots that you can use in any way you want. All have been placed online under the Creative Commons Zero licence CC Zero, meaning all rights are waived by contributors. For artists, submitting photographs to respected curated free image sites offer one route to free publicity. Users do not have …
Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants with Groups and Descriptions Volume 1 by Elizabeth Twining (1805-1889) was published in London in 1868 by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. These images are now in the Public Domain. Elizabeth Twinning was part of the eponymously named tea family. Rich, educated and well-connected she reportedly spent her …
Lewisham born Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) illustrated a number of well-known children’s books in the early 1900s, including Aesop’s Fables, Gulliver’s Travels and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His work became intrinsically linked to the stories, with abiding memories based on the visuals he created. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie was published in 1906 and …
Edward Lear (1812-1888) had his own take on the Linnean system of binomial nomenclature, using it to create crazy nonsense plant names to label crazy nonsense plant illustrations. All of which are enduring, humorous triumphs. Today, we have well defined botanical rules when naming plant species, the foundations of which were laid by Swedish natural …
The online Digitalt Museum collects together images from a number of different Swedish museums. It currently has over half a million artworks in the Public Domain and hundreds of thousands more that are free to use with the appropriate Creative Commons licence. A search on ‘träd’ (tree in Swedish), ‘photograph’ and ‘Public Domain’, returns a wonderful collection of black and …