Bobart the Younger’s Hortus Siccus

Bobart the Younger’s Hortus Siccus comprises 2,202 specimens mounted on individual sheets and filed according to Morison’s Sciagraphia (Harris, 2006). The specimens were originally bound into volumes that were split apart in the late nineteenth century. The date of this collection is unknown, although Vines and Druce (1914), based on circumstantial evidence, suggests the collection may have been made around 1666.

The specimen of ‘Malva hortensis major simplex’ shows two flowers and a leaf mounted, using glue, on a sheet of seventeenth-century paper. The flowers have been pressed so that the petals are separated and the reproductive parts clearly visible (although the function of these was not understood by Bobart). A single leaf is displayed with its top surface uppermost. The cracking of the leaf is probably a consequence of changes in humidity, with consequent expansion or contraction of the paper. Flower colour has been lost but at least two different individuals are represented because of the distribution of the remaining pigmentation.

Jacob Bobart the Younger has labelled the specimen with a polynomial name (‘Malva hortensis major simplex’ [‘Large simple-flowered garden mallow’] and a common name ‘Single Hollyhocks’. ‘Herb. Bobart’ is the hand of a nineteenth-century cataloguer.

Bobart the Younger's Hortus Siccus was evidently well-known in Oxford. In his hagiographic poem Vertumnus (1713), Abel Evans (1675-1737) devotes a verse to Bobart’s herbarium:
Thy Hortus Siccus still receives:
In Tomes twice Ten, that Work immense!
By Thee compil'd at vast Expence;
With utmost Diligence amass'd,
And shall as many Ages last.

References

Harris SA 2006. Bobart the Younger’s Hortus Siccus. Oxford Plant Systematics 13: 10-11.

Vines SH and Druce GC 1914. An account of the Morisonian Herbarium in the possession of the University of Oxford together with biographical and critical sketches of Morison and the two Bobarts and their works and the early history of the Physic Garden 1619-1720. Oxford, Clarendon Press.