The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Herbal & the Kitchen Garden

The Prickly Samphire

Echinophora spinosa

A spined umbellifer of Mediterranean sand — architecture disguised as a weed.

Book
Flora Graeca
Plate
vol. 3, t. 265
Artist
Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp
Date
1806–1840
Held by
Wikimedia Commons
vol. 3, t. 265Echinophora spinosa

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 carrot relative that grows on Mediterranean beaches, armed all over with spines, its flower heads held in flat plates above a rosette built like a piece of engineering. The umbellifers are the family that includes the carrot, the parsnip, hemlock and the plant that killed Socrates, and telling them apart is a matter of small structural details — which is precisely what Bauer's dissections along the margin are for. In this family, the difference between dinner and death is a detail at the margin.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Prickly Samphire framed on the wall
The Prickly Samphire framed on the wall
The Prickly Samphire framed on the wall
The Prickly Samphire framed on the wall

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

The Sea Orache — Flora Graeca, Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp, 1806–1840

1806–1840

The Sea Orache

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

vol. 10, t. 962Atriplex halimus
The Bastard Cabbage — Flora Graeca, Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp, 1806–1840

1806–1840

The Bastard Cabbage

A roadside weed of the Aegean, recorded to the same standard as a rare orchid.

vol. 7, t. 612Rapistrum rugosum
The Frog Fruit — Flora Graeca, Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp, 1806–1840

1806–1840

The Frog Fruit

A creeping mat plant, drawn wide — one of the few landscape plates in the flora.

vol. 6, t. 553Phyla nodiflora