The Sea Orache

Atriplex halimus

From the most expensive flora ever produced — thirty copies, forty years, one fortune.

Book: Flora Graeca
Plate: vol. 10, t. 962
Artist: Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp
Date: 1806–1840
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

vol. 10, t. 962Atriplex halimus

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 Flora Graeca is the most costly botanical work ever undertaken: Sibthorp travelled the eastern Mediterranean with Ferdinand Bauer in the 1780s, died young, and left his entire estate in trust to publish the results. It took forty years and ten volumes, and only about thirty complete sets were made. Bauer drew every plate from field sketches coded by number, as he later would in Australia. A man left his whole fortune to finish a book he would never see.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Sea Orache 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 (1806–1840).
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