The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Herbal & the Kitchen Garden

The Frog Fruit

Phyla nodiflora

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

Book
Flora Graeca
Plate
vol. 6, t. 553
Artist
Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp
Date
1806–1840
Held by
Wikimedia Commons
vol. 6, t. 553Phyla nodiflora

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 low creeping plant that mats across damp ground and throws up small lilac flower heads on short stalks, drawn sideways across the sheet because that is the shape the plant is. Most flower plates are portrait because most flowers stand up; Bauer turns the paper when the plant asks him to, which sounds trivial and is actually the whole difference between a record and a decoration. He let the plant decide which way up the paper went.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Frog Fruit framed on the wall
The Frog Fruit framed on the wall
The Frog Fruit framed on the wall
The Frog Fruit 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 Prickly Samphire — Flora Graeca, Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp, 1806–1840

1806–1840

The Prickly Samphire

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

vol. 3, t. 265Echinophora spinosa