Now well over two hundred years old, Curtis's Botanical Magazine is the longest running botanical periodical featuring colour illustrations of plants. Each four-part volume of the magazine contains 24 botanically precise plant portraits reproduced from watercolour originals by some of the world's leading botanical artists.
Cornflower blue, a shade of azure, is a shade of light blue with relatively little green compared to blue. Cornflowers have been used and prized historically for their blue pigment. This hue was one of the favorites of Johannes Vermeer.
The Palmenhaus Schönbrunn is a large greenhouse in Vienna, Austria featuring plants from around the world. It opened in 1882. It is among the largest botanical exhibits of its kind in the world, with around 4,500 plant species.
VVV magazine was the direct product of the leading Surrealists of the day. The magazine was edited by David Hare in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and Max Ernst.
The Choix des Plus Belles Fleurs is the masterpiece of Redouté’s later years. This most celebrated of botanical artists came from a Belgian family of painters, and served as drawing master to the queens and princesses of France for half a century.
The udumbara flower is said in Buddhist legend to bloom only once every 3,000 years, the last time being before the birth of Buddha.
Down the Garden Path has stood the test of time as one of the world's best-loved and most-quoted gardening books. Ostensibly an account of the creation of a garden in Huntingdonshire in the 1930s, it is really about the underlying emotions and obsessions for which gardening is just a cover story.
Paphiopedilum rothschildianum is a species of orchid commonly known as the King of the Paphs. It is a large sized clear-leafed plant. It blooms with a tall inflorescence with up to six, large flowers. It is unique in the Corypetalum group by holding its petals almost horizontally, giving the flower a very large appearance.
Kadupui is a flower that blooms at midnight and dies in the morning.
The Talipot palm flowers only once in its lifetime, producing the biggest inflorescence in the flowering kingdom. The palm grows for 30 to 80 years, storing up energy and strength in its trunk to send out this massive inflorescence. After flowering and fruiting the plant will die.