Toadflax

Linaria

A wild roadside flower given a full plate in a book about empire’s hothouses.

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

Linaria

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

Toadflax grows on English roadsides and looks like a small yellow snapdragon; a bumblebee has to force the closed mouth of the flower open to get in, which is why the plant is pollinated by heavy bees and nothing else. Thornton gives it a full plate with its parts laid out along the edge, in a book otherwise crowded with tropical spectacle. He knew where the interesting mechanisms were. The most ingenious flower in the book grows in a ditch.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

Toadflax 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 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