Water Pepper and the Persicarias, Antique Wild Flower Print, circa 1873

An original antique color plate from Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, this sheet shows five British persicarias, among them the biting persicaria long known as water pepper. Upright spikes rise all across the sheet, some of them a soft green yellow and some strung with small rose pink flowers along drooping threads. Long lance shaped leaves clasp the jointed stems, a creeping rooting stem runs along the foot of the page, and the whole plate is an exercise in the shapes a single genus can take.

The plate comes from The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, and their allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts and Horsetails, written and drawn by Anne Pratt and published in London by Frederick Warne and Co. of Bedford Street, Covent Garden. The work runs to six volumes and was issued under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This sheet belongs to Volume IV, whose title page records 249 species printed in color.

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. Marked handling soiling along the bottom, right and top edges. Scattered light foxing in the margin. Slight wear at the bottom right corner. One larger brown mark.

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