The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Temple of Flora

The Paeony, Double and Single

Paeonia

The same flower twice — as nature made it, and as gardeners remade it.

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
Paeonia

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 single paeony and a double one on the same sheet, which is a quietly radical thing to draw: the double is the single with its stamens converted into petals by centuries of selection, and putting them together shows you exactly what gardeners have been doing to flowers since gardens existed. Doubling makes a flower spectacular and usually sterile. Every "improved" flower is one that has been made worse at being a flower.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Paeony, Double and Single framed on the wall
The Paeony, Double and Single framed on the wall
The Paeony, Double and Single framed on the wall
The Paeony, Double and Single 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