Seeing Plants: From Botanical Illustration to Living Systems
Kerry Ferguson Essays — The Intelligence of the Natural World
Art, Botanical Science and Nature-Informed Thought Essay | 2026
Abstract
Plants have never been made visible through neutral representation alone. Across different periods, botanical images have selected, isolated, magnified, reconstructed and contextualised plants according to changing systems of knowledge. Medicinal herbals emphasised identification; Renaissance botanical illustration increasingly privileged direct observation; scientific illustration clarified diagnostic structures; expeditionary images served taxonomy, collecting and imperial administration; photography altered the relationship between specimen and image; microscopy and magnification revealed structures beyond ordinary sight; and living plants eventually entered artistic institutions as material rather than representation. This essay traces that history as a sequence of visual knowledge systems rather than a simple progression from art to science or from drawing to photography. It considers the work of Leonhart Fuchs, Maria Sibylla Merian, Franz and Ferdinand Bauer, Marianne North, Anna Atkins, the Blaschkas, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Blossfeldt and Edward Steichen, while also examining botanical representation within colonial networks and the often under-recognised contribution of local and Indian artists. The history demonstrates that every botanical image answers a about what needs to be seen. As scientific knowledge expanded, the plant moved from specimen towards relationship, environment, scale, reconstruction and eventually living process. (Museum of Modern Art 1936)
The Botanical Image as Knowledge
For much of the history of botany, an image of a plant was not created primarily as an autonomous work of art. It was a means of making botanical knowledge visible.
Ancient and medieval herbals linked plants with medicinal use, identification and transmitted knowledge. Works associated with Dioscorides became enormously influential across centuries, but repeated copying could gradually detach illustrations from direct observation. Images inherited from earlier manuscripts sometimes became increasingly stylised as they moved through successive versions.
The problem was epistemological as much as artistic. If an image was intended to help identify a plant, how much could it depart from the living specimen before its usefulness was diminished?
Renaissance botanical works addressed this problem increasingly through direct observation. Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium of 1542 is significant not because botanical illustration suddenly became scientifically objective, but because careful observation and detailed woodcut representation helped re-establish the plant itself as the primary source. (Fuchs 1542; Blunt and Stearn 1950)
The botanical image became a disciplined act of selection. It could not include everything. It had to decide which structures were enough to show clearly. From the beginning, botanical representation involved interpretation.
What Needs to Be Seen?
Scientific illustration is sometimes contrasted with artistic interpretation as though one records and the other invents.
Botanical illustration demonstrates why that distinction is too simple. A photograph records one particular view of a specimen under particular conditions. A botanical illustration can combine information derived from different stages, angles or scales into one coherent image. Flower, fruit, seed, leaf surface and dissected structure can appear together even though they may not have been visible simultaneously. The resulting image is constructed. Its construction does not make it less scientifically useful. It can make the relevant information more legible.
Botanical illustrators decide what should be emphasised, separated, enlarged or omitted. The image becomes an argument about what needs to be seen for the plant to be recognised or understood. This principle remains throughout the history that follows. New technologies changed the possibilities of botanical representation, but none eliminated selection. (Nickelsen 2006)
Classification and Visual Thought
Carl Linnaeus is usually remembered through systems of classification and nomenclature rather than through visual culture, yet botanical classification depended upon trained acts of seeing. Differences among stamens, pistils, flowers, fruits and other structures had to be observed, compared and described. Classification transformed visual variation into systematic information. The resulting botanical knowledge was not simply textual. It required distinctions that could be perceived and communicated.
Illustration continued to perform a role within a classificatory culture. The scientific value of the image lay not in decorative resemblance but in its capacity to clarify relationships among structures. The history of botanical representation during this period demonstrates that observation and classification were interconnected. The image did not merely accompany knowledge that had already been produced elsewhere. It participated in making differences legible.
Maria Sibylla Merian and the Move Towards Relationship
Maria Sibylla Merian altered another aspect of botanical representation by placing plants within relationships of insect life cycles, feeding and metamorphosis.
Her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705 following her journey to Suriname, represented insects together with the plants upon which she had observed them. Eggs, larvae, pupae and adult insects appeared in relation to botanical hosts. The importance of this work should not be exaggerated retrospectively by describing Merian as though she practised modern ecology. Her observations belonged to a different scientific context. Nevertheless, the unit of attention had changed. (Merian 1705)
The isolated botanical specimen was no longer always sufficient. Plant, insect, feeding relationship and transformation could occupy the same visual field. The image began to show not merely what an organism looked like, but something of what occurred around and through it. Merian’s work provides an historical transition from specimen towards relationship.
Botanical Illustration and Scientific Observation
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced some of the most technically accomplished collaborations between botanical science and visual representation.
At Kew, Franz Bauer became closely associated with microscopic observation as well as botanical illustration. Appointed botanical painter to King George III and working at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Bauer examined structures that could not be understood through external appearance alone. His work demonstrates that botanical illustration could be part of scientific investigation rather than merely the recording of conclusions produced by botanists.
Ferdinand Bauer extended this tradition through expeditionary science. As botanical draughtsman on Matthew Flinders’s Investigator voyage to Australia, he produced exceptionally precise studies of plants encountered during the expedition.
His practice depended upon disciplined observation and systems for recording colour and morphology under difficult field conditions. The resulting images were shaped by expeditionary circumstances, collection practices and later studio work as much as by direct encounter.
These artists complicate any attempt to separate scientific observer from artist. Their visual practice was itself a means of botanical investigation.
Expedition, Empire and the Botanical Image
Botanical expeditions did not occur outside politics. During European colonial expansion, plants became subjects of scientific curiosity, economic interest and imperial administration. Botanical gardens, herbaria, collecting networks and illustrated publications participated in systems through which plants were identified, transported, cultivated and evaluated.
Daniela Bleichmar’s work on Spanish imperial expeditions demonstrates the enormous role visual materials played in Enlightenment botanical projects. Thousands of plant illustrations were produced not merely as records of beauty but as tools within scientific and administrative systems. (Bleichmar 2012)
The familiar convention of isolating a specimen against blank space was highly effective for morphological comparison. At the same time, it could remove geography, ecology, cultural knowledge and the circumstances of collection from the image.
The plant appeared detached from place. Londa Schiebinger’s scholarship similarly demonstrates the relationship between botanical knowledge, colonial movement and economic interests. European botanical science depended upon encounters with plants and knowledge systems that existed long before imperial institutions documented them. (Schiebinger 2004)
The history of botanical representation must include not only what images revealed, but the networks through which botanical knowledge became authorised.
The Artists Whose Knowledge Was Less Visible
The institutional history of botanical art frequently privileged the names of European botanists, collectors and patrons while leaving many artists and local knowledge holders less visible.
The extensive body of botanical illustration produced in India during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides an example. Thousands of works now held by institutions including Kew were commissioned by East India Company botanists and produced by Indian artists. These images were part of collaborative knowledge-making, but collaboration occurred within profoundly unequal political structures. Local artists adapted their practices to scientific requirements imposed by European institutions. Their work contributed directly to the visual description of South Asian plants, while their names and intellectual contribution were often less prominently recorded than those of the European botanists who commissioned them. (Noltie 1999; Rix 2021)
This history complicates the idea of botanical science as knowledge moving outward from European centres. Knowledge moved through networks involving collectors, artists, translators, cultivators and people with local botanical expertise. The unequal distribution of recognition is itself part of the history of seeing plants.
Knowledge Beyond the Western Botanical Image
The existence of local and Indigenous botanical knowledge also requires a methodological distinction. Communities across the world had long developed sophisticated relationships with plants through food, medicine, fibre, cultivation, season, ceremony, material practice and ecological knowledge.
Within Australia, First Nations knowledge of plants is inseparable in many contexts from Country, cultural responsibility and systems of knowledge that cannot be reduced to Western botanical categories.
The history of botanical understanding has always been more culturally distributed than institutional histories have often made visible.
From Specimen to Place
The conventions of scientific illustration often required the plant to be isolated so that its morphology could be examined clearly.
Marianne North travelled extensively during the nineteenth century and produced hundreds of oil paintings of plants within environments rather than presenting them exclusively as isolated specimens. Vegetation appears together with landscape, architecture, animals and other features of place. Her work occupies an unusual position between botanical observation, travel, natural history and painting. North’s images restored some of the environmental context removed by the isolated botanical specimen, although the conditions of her travel also belonged to the colonial networks of the period and should not be separated from them. (North 1892; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew n.d.)
In Australia, Ellis Rowan similarly worked across botanical observation, natural history and painting. Her images foregrounded the visual richness of plants within a broader artistic practice rather than functioning solely as taxonomic illustrations.
Anna Atkins and the Specimen as Image-Making Material
Photography transformed botanical representation, but it did not simply replace drawing. Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, produced from 1843 onwards, occupies a foundational position in the history of photographic publication. Atkins placed specimens directly onto sensitised paper and exposed them to light. The plant itself participated physically in producing the image. (Atkins 1843–1853)
This differs fundamentally from drawing. The specimen was no longer merely observed and then represented by hand. Its material presence affected the photographic surface directly. Atkins chose specimens, arranged compositions and determined how individual forms would occupy the page. Mechanical reproduction did not remove artistic or scientific judgement.
The cyanotype created another relationship among specimen, evidence and image. The plant became both subject and instrument of representation.
Reconstruction and the Blaschka Glass Flowers
The Blaschka Glass Flowers at Harvard provide another challenge to the assumption that scientific truth requires direct or natural material. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka produced thousands of glass models representing hundreds of plant species for botanical teaching. (Harvard Museum of Natural History n.d.)
Glass could reproduce structures that preserved specimens often represented poorly. Flowers that collapsed when dried could be reconstructed. Anatomical sections could be enlarged. Developmental stages could be compared. Microscopic structures could be made physically visible.
The models are artificial objects. Their scientific value depended precisely upon that artificiality. By reconstructing botanical structure in another material, the Blaschkas could show relationships that the original specimen could not always display conveniently. Fidelity does not always mean material identity scientific truth can sometimes be clarified through reconstruction.
Ernst Haeckel and the Migration of Scientific Form
Scientific imagery also moved outward into artistic culture. Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, published around the turn of the twentieth century, presented highly organised images of biological forms whose symmetry, geometry and complexity attracted audiences far beyond zoology. (Haeckel 1899–1904)
Haeckel’s subject matter was not principally botanical, yet his importance to this history lies in the movement of scientific visualisation into art, ornament and design.
Natural structures revealed through scientific observation became a visual vocabulary for modern culture.
The relationship was no longer one in which art merely illustrated scientific knowledge.
Scientific images themselves became aesthetic objects and sources of artistic form. Knowledge generated new visual possibilities.
Karl Blossfeldt and the Transformation of Scale
Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs of plant forms demonstrate how technology can make a familiar subject unfamiliar. Using photographic enlargement, Blossfeldt presented stems, seed heads, tendrils and other botanical structures at scales that transformed their visual character. Small plant forms appeared architectural, sculptural or mechanical. His photographs were used within art and design teaching before achieving broader recognition through Urformen der Kunst in 1928. Magnification revealed structures present within ordinary botanical material but easily overlooked by ordinary perception. The image does not merely record a plant it changes the conditions under which the plant is seen.
Scientific Illustration Did Not Disappear
Photography did not make botanical illustration obsolete. A photograph can preserve immense visual detail, but it remains tied to a particular specimen, moment, viewpoint and optical condition. Botanical illustration can still combine structures from multiple specimens, remove irrelevant damage, clarify overlapping parts and present diagnostic features with deliberate precision. The relationship between photography and illustration became complementary rather than simply sequential.
The same principle applies more broadly to technologies of scientific observation. Each method makes different aspects of the biological subject available.
When the Living Plant Enters the Museum
In 1936 Edward Steichen exhibited living delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The event marked a significant conceptual shift. Steichen was already known as a photographer, but he had also spent years hybridising delphiniums. The exhibition presented living cultivated plants within an institution devoted to modern art. The plant was no longer represented through paint, drawing, photography or reconstruction. The living organism itself entered the exhibition. This altered the relationship between art and botanical subject.
The artwork could no longer be understood entirely as an image separated from biological process. Steichen provides the trajectory from botanical illustration to modern art was no longer simply representation is could become living material. Later artists would push this relationship much further through plant breeding, ecological systems, living tissues and biotechnology. The botanical subject had begun to move from representation towards biological process.
Across this history, plants have been made visible through very different systems.
Herbals emphasised medicinal identity. Renaissance illustration returned attention to observed morphology. Classification transformed visible differences into organised botanical knowledge. Merian placed plant and insect within relational observation.
Scientific illustrators combined field observation, microscopy and disciplined reconstruction. Imperial expeditions linked botanical imagery with collecting, administration and unequal systems of knowledge. Photography allowed specimens to participate directly in image formation. Glass models reconstructed botanical structures. Magnification transformed scale. Living cultivated plants eventually entered artistic institutions themselves. The sequence is not a progression from inaccurate images to accurate ones. Nor is it a movement in which art gradually becomes science.
Each method produces a different botanical object. The pressed specimen, botanical plate, cyanotype, glass model, enlarged photograph and living cultivated plant all make different claims about what should be seen. Together they reveal an increasingly complex history of botanical visibility.
What Becomes Visible, and What Disappears?
Every system of representation reveals by excluding. The isolated botanical plate clarifies morphology while often removing habitat. A photograph records the specimen but cannot automatically show developmental stages that occur at different times.
A glass model can clarify anatomy but replaces biological material with reconstruction.
Magnification reveals hidden structure while changing the perceived scale of the object. A living exhibition restores growth and biological time but introduces conditions of cultivation and institutional control. It is a recognition that a plant exists across more dimensions than one image can contain. The history of botanical art and scientific representation anticipates one of the central arguments of this series. The plant can be visible form, developmental history, ecological relationship, chemical system and cultural object simultaneously.
Seeing Plants Again
Botanical representation has never simply reproduced what was already there.
It has continually reorganised botanical knowledge. The history moves from medicinal identification towards direct observation, from isolated morphology towards relationship, from drawing towards photographic contact, from preserved specimen towards reconstruction, from ordinary scale towards magnification and eventually from image towards living organism. The botanical drawing persists beside photography. The herbarium persists beside molecular analysis. Direct observation persists beside digital imaging.
The next essay changes the position of the observer once again. If botanical representation asks how plants can be made visible, biophilia asks what happens when the relationship with nature is no longer understood principally as one of looking.
The observer is not outside the natural environment. The observer is already within it.
Research Context
The Intelligence of the Natural World is an interdisciplinary research series by Kerry Ferguson examining how botanical and scientific knowledge changes the ways in which the natural world can be perceived, interpreted and represented. The research brings together botanical science, art, environmental aesthetics, biophilia, biomimicry, material inquiry and the histories through which living systems have been observed, classified and understood.
The essays distinguish scientific evidence from artistic and philosophical interpretation. Scientific knowledge can inform artistic thought and creative practice, while artistic analogy, metaphor and abstraction are not presented as biological proof. The purpose of the series is not to collapse art and science into a single discipline, but to investigate what becomes possible when different forms of knowledge encounter the same living systems.
The research is intellectually independent while intersecting with scientific research undertaken through Botanical Innovations and artistic and design investigations developed through Dangerous Beauty. Together, these fields contribute to a broader inquiry into the intelligence, complexity and continuing creative significance of the natural world.
References
Atkins, Anna. 1843–1853. Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Privately issued in parts.
Bleichmar, Daniela. 2012. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. University of Chicago Press.
Blunt, Wilfrid, and William T. Stearn. 1950. The Art of Botanical Illustration. Collins.
Fuchs, Leonhart. 1542. De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes. Basel: Michael Isingrin.
Haeckel, Ernst. 1899–1904. Kunstformen der Natur. Bibliographisches Institut.
Harvard Museum of Natural History. n.d. “Glass Flowers: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants.” Accessed September 8, 2026.
Merian, Maria Sibylla. 1705. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Amsterdam.
Museum of Modern Art. 1936. “Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums.” Exhibition, June 24–July 1, 1936.
Nickelsen, Kärin. 2006. Draughtsmen, Botanists and Nature: The Construction of Eighteenth-Century Botanical Illustrations. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4820-3.
Noltie, Henry J. 1999. Indian Botanical Drawings 1793–1868: From the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
North, Marianne. 1892. Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North. Macmillan.
Rix, Martyn. 2021. Indian Botanical Art: An Illustrated History. Kew Publishing in association with Roli Books.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. n.d. “Marianne North Gallery.” Accessed September 8, 2026.
Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press.
Continue the Research
The Intelligence of the Natural World forms part of Kerry Ferguson’s continuing interdisciplinary research into botanical science, art, biophilia, biomimicry and nature-informed thought.
Explore the complete essay series and related research through Kerry Ferguson, discover scientific research and botanical innovation through Botanical Innovations, and explore the translation of these ideas into art, textiles, pattern, material and spatial design through Dangerous Beauty.
