The Cape Weed

Arctotheca calendula

A daisy from the Cape, and one of the great botanical travellers.

Book: Plantarum Rariorum Horti Caesarei Schoenbrunnensis
Artist: Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin
Date: 1797–1804
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Arctotheca calendula

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

$29.00

The story

A yellow daisy from the Cape of Good Hope, growing in an Austrian imperial garden and drawn there. It has since become one of the most successful invasive plants in the world — a mat-forming weed across Australia, California and southern Europe. The plate shows it as a prize. Two centuries of careful horticultural exchange produced a great many of these afterwards. Half the world's worst weeds arrived as somebody's treasure.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Cape Weed 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 (1797–1804).
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