Everlasting flowers between the pages: the making of seventeenth-century florilegia

Abstract

"In seventeenth-century Europe, florilegia were lavishly produced picture books that featured hand-drawn or printed illustrations of a wide variety of flowers. Many of the plants depicted in florilegia stemmed from the Americas and Asia and were much desired for cultivation and study in European gardens. By approaching florilegia as material objects, this colourfully illustrated volume offers new insights into how florilegia mirrored different forms of plant knowledge. The volume reconstructs the expertise which gardeners, compilers of florilegia, and image-makers must have possessed in order to cultivate the once-living specimens and immortalise the flowers on paper and parchment."-- Publisher's website.

Contents

Introduction -- Rare and Curious Flowers in the Seventeenth Century -- Growing Flowers into Rarities and Curiosities -- Picking Flowers for Every Season through Images and Text -- From Describing Flower Colours to the Colouring of Flowers -- Keeping Flowers between the Pages -- Making Colourful Images of Flowers in Life-Size -- Conclusion -- Appendix 1: Making Colours Series -- Appendix 2: Planting Pigments ColLAB -- Appendix 3: Hortus floridus Iesse, or, the Imperfect Book of Flowers : a Twenty-First Century Florilegium.