In this wallpaper that William Morris designed, the striking effects derive from the use of non local colour to reinvent the distinctively golden flowers in blue. The effect is to cool the gold and to defamiliarise what could have easily been a cliched scene. Presumably, the inclusion of white in the scheme would have brought …

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 …

Franz Eugen Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen or Medicinal Plants was published in 1887 in Germany. It comes in four volumes and includes over 300 detailed, beautiful, botanical illustrations of plants. Below we supply 115 from Volume 2. See previous post for Volume 1 and associated book and source details. The age of this book is over 75 …