The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Grand Flower

A Eucalypt

Eudesmia tetragona

The tree that defines a continent, treated as seriously as an orchid.

Book
Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae
Artist
Ferdinand Bauer
Date
1801–1806
Held by
David Rumsey Map Collection · via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons
Eudesmia tetragona

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

Size

$29.00

The story

A eucalypt from Western Australia, drawn with the bud caps, the open flower, the fruit and the leaf all on one sheet — the four states that let a botanist name a species without ever seeing the tree. Europe had no category for a continent-wide forest of a single genus, and much of what it eventually understood arrived through drawings like this one. The gum tree got its first serious portrait from an Austrian on an English ship.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

A Eucalypt printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

A Eucalypt framed on the wall
A Eucalypt framed on the wall
A Eucalypt framed on the wall
A Eucalypt framed on the wall

About this reproduction

  • A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by David Rumsey Map Collection · via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1801–1806).
  • Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years (inscribed pieces and atelier bouquets are set by hand and printed to order).
  • Colour-managed to the source scan: the hand-colour is the colourist’s, not ours. We correct nothing and invent nothing.
  • Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
  • If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the stipple that makes a petal look soft, the wash of the hand-colourist, the veins of the leaf — on stock made to outlive its owner. A poster reproduces the picture. This reproduces the plate.

From the same hand

The Albany Pitcher Plant — Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae, Ferdinand Bauer, 1801–1806

1801–1806

The Albany Pitcher Plant

A carnivorous plant found once, at the bottom of the world, and drawn perfectly the first time.

Cephalotus follicularis
Synaphea — Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae, Ferdinand Bauer, 1801–1806

1801–1806

Synaphea

A Western Australian shrub, drawn with the patience of an anatomist.

Synaphea dilatata
Franklandia — Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae, Ferdinand Bauer, 1801–1806

1801–1806

Franklandia

The lantern flower of the south-west, in a hand that never guessed.

Franklandia fucifolia