Sea Plantains and Shoreweed, Antique Coastal Botanical Print, circa 1873

An original antique botanical plate of the British flora, printed in color in London for Frederick Warne and Co., this sheet is given over to the sea side plantain with the buck's horn plantain and the shoreweed. Three tufts of narrow grass like leaves stand side by side on the sheet with their roots drawn at the foot, and from them rise slender stalks carrying green cylindrical spikes. The spikes of the sea plantain at the center are flushed with purple and hung with fine stamens, and the finely cut leaves of the buck's horn plantain spread at the right.

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.

The work was one of the first thorough illustrated floras of Britain aimed at the ordinary reader rather than the specialist, and the price was only possible because the plates were printed in color instead of being colored by hand. That technical choice is part of what the sheet records, and it put a reliable colored figure of every British species within reach of a wide public for the first time.

Even age toning. Handling soiling along the bottom, right and top edges. All four corners complete. One larger brown mark.

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