Begonia Leopoldi

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• square 0.80 : 1
• published 1854
• Plate 298

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.

1. 01

   First Look

   凡画山水，意在笔先。

   —— 唐·王维《山水论》

   In painting, the intention precedes the brush.

   Nearly square, plant and detail each holding a corner. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the red is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is Begonia leopoldi: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 59.1% of the sheet, foliage 0.9%, 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 red — a red close to carmine, built in washes from a pale ground. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.

4. 04

   Composition

   Nearly square, plant and details sharing the corners. (about 0.80 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 60% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.

5. 05

   Line and Colour

   In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.

6. 06

   Season

   Late spring to early autumn, June through September; under glass they could be had from March. The year 1854 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The best time to read such a plate is its flowering season: three minutes under the tree explains what no text can.

7. 07

   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.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “L'Illustration horticole” was drawn by Charles Antoine Lemaire and published 1854-1896. This plate is Plate 298. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   余既滋兰之九畹兮，又树蕙之百亩。

   —— 战国·屈原《离骚》

   I have planted nine acres of orchids and set out a hundred acres of sweet flag.

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

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. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.

11. 11

    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 red, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.

12. 12

    What to Take Away

    Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1854.