Flower hunters, herbarium plates, the great collecting expeditions. The belief that a specimen pressed flat could carry a living world inside it.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the world was being named. Ships left European ports carrying naturalists, artists, and collectors whose task was to document everything — every plant, every animal, every insect — in lands that European science had not yet catalogued. They brought back specimens. They brought back drawings. They brought back seeds and pressed plants and stories of things so extraordinary that people at home couldn't believe them without proof.
This was the age of the herbarium — the collection of pressed, dried, and mounted plant specimens that could be studied, named, and shared across continents and centuries. A herbarium sheet is the closest thing the natural world has to a permanent record. Pressed and properly stored, a specimen can remain identifiable for hundreds of years. The logic of this — that something dead and flattened can preserve something essential — is exactly the logic of Floral Alchemy.
Luli presses flowers the way the great collectors did: carefully, with attention to the detail that distinguishes one species from another, with the understanding that what she is making will outlast the flower's natural life by decades or centuries. The herbarium tradition is in the practice, whether or not it is named.
Joseph Banks
1743 – 1820
Sailed with Cook on the Endeavour voyage to the Pacific, collecting over 30,000 plant specimens. Founded the botanical gardens at Kew as a center for plant science. Described Banksia — the genus named for him — and hundreds of other species new to European science.
Maria Sibylla Merian
1647 – 1717
One of the first European scientists to observe insects in their natural environments rather than as dead specimens. Traveled to Suriname at age 52 — without a husband, which was extraordinary — and produced her masterwork: Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Her illustrations remain some of the most beautiful in the history of natural history.
Carl Linnaeus
1707 – 1778
Created the binomial nomenclature system still used today — genus and species, the two Latin names that place every living thing in relation to every other. Before Linnaeus, naming was chaos. After him, the world had a grammar. He called plants he particularly loved his "friends."
Pierre-Joseph Redouté
1759 – 1840
The most celebrated botanical illustrator of his era, appointed official court artist to Marie Antoinette and later to the Empress Joséphine. His Les Roses remains the most beautiful book ever produced about roses. He painted each petal as if it were a face worth remembering.
Marianne North
1830 – 1890
Traveled alone to fourteen countries to paint plants in their natural habitats. Her gallery at Kew — the Marianne North Gallery — contains over 800 of her paintings, hung edge to edge in the Victorian style, covering every wall. She paid for it herself. She is extraordinary.
Recommended Reading — Add to your library
The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
The story of how a group of obsessive plant hunters in the eighteenth century transformed the English garden and, in doing so, changed how the world thought about nature. Wulf is a magnificent writer.
Find on Amazon →The Signature of All Things
A novel set in the world of nineteenth-century botany, following a woman botanist obsessed with mosses. Beautifully researched and deeply felt — one of the best fictional accounts of what it meant to be a woman who loved science in the wrong century.
Find on Amazon →Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
Kimmerer is a bryologist (moss scientist) who writes about the miniature world of mosses with the attention of a poet and the precision of a scientist. Teaches you to look at scales you had been missing entirely.
Find on Amazon →The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs
A comprehensive reference for the world of medicinal, culinary, and aromatic plants, beautifully illustrated. The kind of book that stays open on the desk rather than on the shelf.
Find on Amazon →