Feathery Perennial Lupine
Feathery Perennial Lupine
Feathery Perennial Lupine
About this plate
Feathery Perennial Lupine is plate 348, from Edwards' Botanical Register, drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, James Ridgway, 1829-1847.
Twelve ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.57 : 1
- published 1829
- Plate 348
Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.
-
First Look
六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。
—— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》
The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
-
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
-
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour is sparing, 1.1% of the sheet against 0.0% of foliage, the cast tending amber — as with pale or white blooms, outline and tone do the talking. Wildflowers are rarely tidy: small blooms, slender stems, leaves imperfect and often chewed. That untidiness is exactly what records wind, light and soil.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
-
Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.57 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 15% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.
-
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.
-
Season
By latitude and altitude; in the northeastern United States, April to August — each species for two or three weeks, so a wildflower book is arranged by month. The year 1829 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The plate records ten days of peak; the other three hundred are leaf, fruit and rest.
-
Provenance
Native plants of woodland floor, bog, roadside and rock crevice; they resent transplanting and will not mass in a border — the difference between a wildflower and a garden flower. The localities on the plate are those of a century ago; plants travel and places change their names.
-
The Book and the Hand
“Edwards' Botanical Register” was drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley and published 1829-1847. This plate is Plate 348. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
-
Poetic Resonance
白日不到处，青春恰自来。苔花如米小，也学牡丹开。
—— 清·袁枚《苔》
Where sunlight never reaches, spring arrives all the same; moss flowers, tiny as grains of rice, still learn to bloom like peonies.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.
-
The Written Tradition
庭下如积水空明，水中藻荇交横，盖竹柏影也。
—— 宋·苏轼《记承天寺夜游》
The courtyard seemed flooded with clear water, weeds crossing in it — in fact the shadows of bamboo and cypress.
The Book of Songs names more than 140 plants, most of them wild; Confucius said the Songs teach the names of birds, beasts and plants — natural history begins in the field. Keep the line; it will surface the next time you meet the same plant.
-
Symbolism
In Chinese verse wildflowers bloom unseen, owing nothing to praise; in the West they mark a place — one species, one landscape's character. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
-
What to Take Away
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1829 gave a whole day to a single flower.
