The Tulip Orchid

Anguloa clowesii

A cupped flower with a loose figure rocking inside it — the “cradle orchid.”

Book: Edwards’s Botanical Register
Plate: Pl. 63
Artist: for John Lindley, Edwards’s Botanical Register
Date: 1844
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Pl. 63Anguloa clowesii

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

The flower is a deep waxy cup, lemon-yellow and barely open, and inside it the lip is hinged so loosely that it rocks when the flower is moved — which is why the Spanish name for the group translates as the cradle orchid, with a baby in it. The rocking is functional: a bee that lands is tipped against the pollen. Everything charming about an orchid turns out, on inspection, to be a trap.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Tulip Orchid 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 (1844).
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