Erica obbata

Ten ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• upright 1.66 : 1
• published 1816
• Plate 54

Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut — then, halfway, a line of Chinese poetry: how the ancients saw this same flower. After it, the flower's language, its season and homeland, its book; and at the end one line of classical prose — and a pair of eyes to take away.

1. 01

   First Look

   竖划三寸，当千仞之高；横墨数尺，体百里之迥。

   —— 南朝宋·宗炳《画山水序》

   A vertical stroke of three inches stands for a cliff of a thousand fathoms; a few feet of ink holds a hundred li.

   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 where the yellow is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is Erica obbata: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 杜鹃花目 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 4.9% of the sheet, foliage 1.2%, the cast red with a second note of yellow-green. 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. Filed under yellow — a honey-yellow, built in washes from a pale ground. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.66 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 14% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Blank paper is not unfinished work: it is where the eye rests.

5. 05

   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. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.

6. 06

   Poetic Resonance

   已收身向园林下，犹寄名于禄仕间。

   —— 唐·白居易《洛下閑居寄山南令狐相公》

   The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the yellow the corolla becomes its resting point.

7. 07

   Symbolism

   Bedding plants carry no imperial weight; they mean the everyday — window sill, border, festival, gift. Victorian floriography grew up among exactly these flowers. This plate leans yellow, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.

8. 08

   Season and Place

   Late spring to early autumn, June through September. 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. The year 1816 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The volume was made in 1816-1827, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

9. 09

   The Book and the Hand

   “Herbier général de l'amateur” was drawn by Jean Claude Michel Mordant de Launay and published 1816-1827. This plate is Plate 54. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

10. 10

    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. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.