The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Temple of Flora

The Bee Larkspur

Delphinium

A flower with a false bee at its centre, to tell real ones where to land.

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
Delphinium

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 bee larkspur takes its name from the small dark tuft at the centre of each flower, which sits there looking convincingly like an insect already in occupation — a signal to real bees that this is a flower worth stopping at. The long spur behind holds the nectar and only a long-tongued bee can reach it. Thornton's dissections along the margin take the whole apparatus apart. The flower advertises with a picture of its own customer.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Bee Larkspur framed on the wall
The Bee Larkspur framed on the wall
The Bee Larkspur framed on the wall
The Bee Larkspur 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 Garden Poppy — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Garden Poppy

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

Papaver somniferum
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