Sea Purslane and the Oraches, Antique Shoreline Plant Plate, circa 1873

This antique botanical plate is Plate 178 of Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain. It shows four British oraches of the shore, among them the shrubby orache known as sea purslane. Mealy gray green leaves and slender flowering shoots spread across the sheet, the stems of two of the plants flushed a clear rose pink. The frosted sea orache at the right carries small yellow green flower clusters along its branches, and a pale woody root is drawn at the bottom of the page.

This is one of the color plates of The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, Anne Pratt's six volume account of the wild plants of the British Isles, published in London by Frederick Warne and Co. under the direction of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The plates were printed in color by the London printer William Dickes, who worked a color process licensed from George Baxter and produced the plates for Pratt's natural history books.

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.

Loss or wear at the top left corner. Even age toning. Handling soiling along the top edge. Scattered light foxing in the margin. Minor edge wear, shallow nicks along the left.

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