The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Grand Flower

A Wild Cardamom

Elettaria speciosa

The spice trade’s own plant, drawn where it grew.

Book
Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l’Île de Java
Artist
Berthe Hoola van Nooten
Date
1863–1864
Held by
Wellcome Collection · via Wikimedia Commons
Elettaria speciosa

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 cardamom relative of the Indonesian forest, its flowering shoots emerging low and separate from the tall leafy stems, as gingers do. The whole reason Europeans were in Java at all was a list of plants like this one, and there is a quiet complication in a beautiful book of colonial botany produced by a woman who was herself financially stranded there. Both things are true of the plate. It is a lovely drawing made inside an arrangement nobody would defend now.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

A Wild Cardamom printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

A Wild Cardamom framed on the wall
A Wild Cardamom framed on the wall
A Wild Cardamom framed on the wall
A Wild Cardamom framed on the wall

About this reproduction

  • A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wellcome Collection · via Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1863–1864).
  • 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 Pride of Burma — Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l’Île de Java, Berthe Hoola van Nooten, 1863–1864

1863–1864

The Pride of Burma

Called the most beautiful flowering tree in the world, and drawn in Java by a widow with four children.

Amherstia nobilis
The Asoka Tree — Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l’Île de Java, Berthe Hoola van Nooten, 1863–1864

1863–1864

The Asoka Tree

A sacred tree of India and Java, in orange going to red.

Saraca declinata
The Croton — Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l’Île de Java, Berthe Hoola van Nooten, 1863–1864

1863–1864

The Croton

A leaf that behaves like a flower — yellow, orange, red and green on one plant.

Codiaeum variegatum