The Marsh Marigold

Caltha palustris

The first flower of the Eichstätt spring — plain, wet-ground gold.

Book: Hortus Eystettensis
Artist: Basilius Besler
Date: 1613
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Caltha palustris

Format

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

$29.00

The story

The marsh marigold opens in wet ground before almost anything else and is one of the oldest flowering plants in northern Europe, essentially unchanged since before the ice. Besler organised the Hortus by the four seasons — Classis Verna, Aestiva, Autumnalis, Hyberna — so this belongs near the front of the whole enormous book, in the spring class. The order of a garden book is a claim about time. Besler filed his garden by when, not by what.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1613).
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