Mezereon and Birthwort, Antique Flowering Shrub Print, Pratt, circa 1873

An original antique color plate, Plate 188 of Volume IV of Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, showing the mezereon in flower with the common birthwort and the lint leaved bastard toadflax. Rose pink flowers of Daphne mezereum are set directly on the bare brown branches at the right of the sheet, as they are on the living shrub before the leaves come. The yellow tubular flowers of the birthwort stand at the center beneath broad heart shaped leaves, and the fine stems and small white flowers of the bastard toadflax spread at the left.

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 right edge. A few small foxing spots in the margin. 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.