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.
