About the house

The Florilegium is a curated house — a few dozen plates, not thirty-three thousand. Every piece comes from one of the great flower books of the 17th to 19th centuries — Redouté, Thornton, Besler, Merian, Blackwell, Furber, Curtis — chosen because it is the finest surviving picture of the plant it names, and every one is centuries out of copyright.

The originals sleep in the great collections — the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Rijksmuseum, Kew, the New York Botanical Garden. Faithful scans of public-domain works are free for anyone to reproduce; what we sell is the curation, the scholarship, the print quality, and the delight. Museum-grade pigment prints, gallery canvas, and heirloom frames — at sizes where Redouté’s stipple resolves into the separate dots it always was, and you can see how the petal was made.

We reproduce; we do not invent. There is exactly one edition of each plate — the plate as its colourists hand-finished it — because the wash and the stipple are the object, and re-tinting a flower someone already coloured by hand would be painting over the thing you came for.

We are a house of Provenance, part of the Painted family, and a sibling to Cartographer’s Dream and Painted Myths. Every factual claim on this site about a plate — who drew it, when, from which garden, under which name — is verified before it is published. Provenance and delight are the product, never the file.