False Chicory (1856)

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast blue
• upright 1.40 : 1
• published 1856
• Plate 57

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

   论画以形似，见与儿童邻。

   —— 宋·苏轼《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》

   To judge painting by likeness alone is the view of a child.

   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.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is False chicory: 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 2.9% of the sheet, foliage 1.7%, the cast blue with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. 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. 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 1.40 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 76% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.

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

   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 1856 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Note the season. Phenology is the most practical tool of appreciation.

7. 07

   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 volume was made in 1856, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Wild flowers of Georgetown, DC” was drawn by Rebecca Nourse and published 1856. This plate is Plate 57. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   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.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    山川之美，古来共谈。高峰入云，清流见底。

    —— 南朝梁·陶弘景《答谢中书书》

    The beauty of mountains and streams has been spoken of since olden times: peaks entering the clouds, clear water to the bottom.

    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.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In Chinese verse wildflowers bloom unseen, owing nothing to praise; in the West they mark a place — one species, one landscape's character. 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. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.