Butterworts and Bladderworts, Antique Insect Eating Plant Plate, circa 1873

Plate 167 of Anne Pratt's British flora, an original antique color plate printed for Frederick Warne and Co. of London, gives the common vervain with four butterworts and three bladderworts; the butterworts and bladderworts are insect eating plants. A large violet flower of Pinguicula grandiflora opens at the top of the sheet above a second deep purple flower, both of them carried on bare stalks that rise from flat star shaped rosettes of pale greasy leaves drawn at the foot. Yellow bladderwort flowers stand at the right, the slender flowering spike of vervain runs up the left, and the fine divided stems of the bladderworts spread across the bottom.

The plate belongs to The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, London, Frederick Warne and Co., the illustrated flora that Anne Pratt wrote and drew and that the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge put its name behind. Volume IV, from which this sheet comes, carries the bindweeds, the gentians, the labiates, the primroses and the docks, and its title page names the New York house of Scribner, Welford and Armstrong as well as Warne in London.

Anne Pratt, born at Strood in Kent in 1806 and self taught as a botanist, was among the best known botanical illustrators in Victorian England. Her books were accurate enough to be used and plain enough to be read, and this flora stayed a standard household reference for decades. Her drawings outlived her by a long way: the fern plates from this very work were still being reused, reduced and unattributed, in pocket guides well into the twentieth century.

Even age toning. Handling soiling along the right and top edges. Slight wear at the bottom right and top left corners.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.