Crested Cow Wheat and Lousewort, Antique Crimson Botanical Plate, circa 1873

An original antique color plate from Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, this sheet shows four British cow wheats with the marsh and pasture louseworts. The purple cow wheat rises through the center of the sheet in a tall spike of crimson bracts with yellow flowers set between them, which is the most striking thing on the page, and the crested cow wheat carries its dense four sided spike at the upper right. Yellow tubular flowers of the common cow wheat spread at the left, and the soft pink hooded flowers of the louseworts open at either side above finely cut leaves.

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.

What makes Pratt's plates worth hanging is her method. Each species is given whole, with root, stem, leaf, flower and often the ripe fruit on the same sheet, and several related species are grouped together so that the differences between them can be read at a glance. The result is a composition rather than a specimen sheet, and it reads as a picture at a distance and as botany close up.

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

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