The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Temple of Flora

The Garden Poppy

Papaver somniferum

The flowering stem and the seed head together — beauty and its consequence.

Book
New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus
Artist
after Robert John Thornton
Date
1799–1807
Held by
Wellcome Collection · via Wikimedia Commons
Papaver somniferum

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

The opium poppy, drawn with the flower and the ripening capsule on the same stem — which is the honest way to draw it, since the capsule is the entire reason the plant has been cultivated for six thousand years. Thornton's project was to illustrate Linnaeus's sexual system of classification, so his plates keep insisting on the reproductive parts even when the picture is at its most romantic. The romance and the botany are the same subject. He was always drawing the mechanism.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Garden Poppy framed on the wall
The Garden Poppy framed on the wall
The Garden Poppy framed on the wall
The Garden Poppy 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 (1799–1807).
  • 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 Campion, Male and Female — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Campion, Male and Female

Two plants on one plate — because this species keeps its sexes apart.

Lychnis
The Tobacco Plant — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Tobacco Plant

Two species of the plant that paid for the eighteenth century.

Nicotiana rustica
Monkshood — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

Monkshood

The most poisonous plant in an English garden, drawn as a decoration.

Aconitum napellus