White and Scarlet Begonia
粉蝶科
White and Scarlet Begonia
About this plate
White and Scarlet Begonia is plate 1429, 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 red
- upright 1.64 : 1
- published 1829
- Plate 1429
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.
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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.
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Name and Thing
Only the genus Begonia is given; species-level names came later. The Chinese name 粉蝶科 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
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Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 11.9% of the sheet, foliage 0.0%, the cast red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Garden annuals and low perennials: many small, brilliantly coloured flowers to a stem, with leaves palmately lobed, pinnate or entire — the mainstay of the Victorian bedding scheme.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
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Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.64 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 16% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
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Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful.
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Season
Late spring to early autumn, June through September; under glass they could be had from March. 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.
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Provenance
Gathered from everywhere by plant hunters and the glasshouse trade: pelargoniums from South Africa, campanulas from European mountains, lobelias from North America, fuchsias from Chile. In the same volume the kin are shelved together; set several plates side by side.
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The Book and the Hand
“Edwards' Botanical Register” was drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley and published 1829-1847. This plate is Plate 1429. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
春色满园关不住，一枝红杏出墙来。
—— 宋·叶绍翁《游园不值》
Spring cannot be shut inside a garden: one branch of apricot reaches over the wall.
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.
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The Written Tradition
会心处不必在远，翳然林水，便自有濠濮间想也。
—— 南朝宋·刘义庆《世说新语·言语》
Where the heart understands, distance is not needed: a screen of trees and a little water, and the mind is already by the River Hao.
China had its own gardening literature — Chen Haozi's Hua Jing on courtyard planting — which, like European bedding, brought wild plants down to human scale. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.
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Symbolism
Bedding plants carry no imperial weight; they mean the everyday — window sill, border, festival, gift. Victorian floriography grew up among exactly these flowers. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
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What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1829.
