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Merian's plates (#1) were books, but the Royal Collection holds luxury sheets of them on vellum, like "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" (item #58). The Trust's note says she inked parts of her etched plate and pressed vellum against it while wet, so mostly the insects transferred, and the rest was painted by hand, probably with her daughters' help. Because she moved the butterflies between copies, no two sheets share a composition. …
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. …
Elizabeth Blackwell (#31, via Nicky Monroe at the RHS Lindley Library) drew each plant for A Curious Herbal from live specimens in the Apothecaries' Garden, and put several views and growth stages of it into a single picture. Merian's plate (#1) does the same with a plant and an insect's life cycle: the stages sit side by side though they happened weeks apart. …
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. …
Lizzie Harper (#23) says a leaf's veins and shadow, plus the colours of a couple of flowers, are enough for her to rebuild a whole plant later, even out of bloom. Bauer (#12) went further: numbers for colours in the field, and a plate years afterward.
Both keep the field page small on purpose. What it records is what the later drawing cannot invent.
Try it: sit with one plant for twenty minutes and make a page that holds only what you could not reconstruct from memory. Leave it a week, then draw the whole plant from that page alone, and see what you wish you had written down.
Merian's plate (#1) puts a plant and an insect's whole life cycle on one page: the stages sit side by side though they happened over weeks. Darwin's glass traces (#8) do something similar for a leaf, turning hours of movement into one line of joined dots.
Both draw time. A photograph catches one moment; these two flatten many into a single sheet you can read at a glance.
Try it: pick one thing that changes over a week, a bud or a fruit, and draw its stages on one page, with a small date beside each.
Ferdinand Bauer (#12, via the V&A's Richard Mulholland) pencilled numbers instead of colours in the field, and painted about 1,500 Flora Graeca watercolours from that code, sometimes years later. The chart that decoded it is lost.
Put him beside Flora Danica (#3), which got its consistency from many hands over 123 years. Bauer got his from one private system. Either way, the plate is the last step, and the discipline is in what you write down at the plant.
Try it: pick a flower, invent twenty numbered colours, and note only numbers. Paint it next week.
Trace a plant's day
Darwin (#8) tied a wire to a leaf and marked its tip on glass at intervals, so the dots drew the movement. Hooke (#5) drew what only a lens could show.
Do Darwin's rig on a windowsill: a pane of glass, a fixed mark, a thread on a seedling leaf. Mark its position every hour for a day, join the dots, and draw the leaf beside the trace. Which tells you more, the leaf or the line?
Closer than the eye
Pick one leaf and draw it three times: as you see it, under a cheap magnifier, and under a phone microscope, the way Hooke reported what nobody had seen (#5). Then arrange the three like a Haeckel plate (#6), and note where you stylized.
A year on one page
Draw one plant from your street with everything that lives on it across a year, on a single sheet, the way Merian's plates hold a life cycle (#1). Keep it plain and consistent, like a Flora Danica plate (#3), so the page can grow into a series.