Wild Thyme and Marjoram, Antique Herb Garden Plate by Anne Pratt, circa 1873

This antique botanical plate is Plate 160 of Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain. It shows wild thyme and marjoram with the three British germanders. Crimson red flowers of the wall germander run up the center of the sheet in loose whorls, the brightest color on the page, and rose pink heads of wild thyme spread at the left with the marjoram at the upper right. The pale yellow wood germander stands at the right on a slender stem, and small neat leaves are drawn along every shoot.

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.

Anne Pratt, 1806 to 1893, wrote more than twenty books on plants and birds and received little critical attention in her own lifetime, which later writers have put down to the Victorian reluctance to take a self taught woman seriously as a scientist. Her books nonetheless sold in very large numbers, and her plates remain widely familiar images of the British wild flora of that century.

Even age toning. Marked handling soiling along the bottom, right and top edges. Scattered light foxing in the margin. Slight wear at the top left corner.

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