The Bastard Cabbage

Rapistrum rugosum

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

Book: Flora Graeca
Plate: vol. 7, t. 612
Artist: Ferdinand Bauer, for John Sibthorp
Date: 1806–1840
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

vol. 7, t. 612Rapistrum rugosum

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 yellow-flowered mustard of Mediterranean roadsides and field margins — a weed, by any ordinary definition, and drawn here with the full apparatus of the greatest botanical draughtsman of the age. That is what a flora is: not a selection of the beautiful, but an attempt at everything that grows in a place. The weeds get the same paper as the orchids because the book is a claim about a whole landscape. A flora has no favourites. That is the entire idea.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Bastard Cabbage 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