Plant to drawing: Geranium and Sideritis

Commentary
Plant to drawing: Geranium and Sideritis

The Morisonian Herbarium has many sheets with sketches attached or sketches with pieces of dried plant attached (Harris, 2016). Moreover, many similar uncatalogued sketches are scattered though the archive associated with Bobart the Younger in the Sherardian Library of Plant Taxonomy. Detailed study of these collections may reveal many preparatory sketches associated with the Historia, especially Part 3.

The specimen of Sideritis montana, an eastern Mediterranean member of the mint family, was given to Bobart by the prelate Robert Huntington (c.1637-1701), who was chaplain to the Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, between 1670 and 1681. The drawing is characteristic of those attributable to Jacob Bobart the Younger. That the drawing is a collage may be because the drawn parts of the specimen were exchanged with other botanists by Bobart. Specimen exchange was an essential part of the processes of early modern science, for the cementing of relationships and for the maintenance and acquisition of reputation and connoisseurship (Ogilvie, 2006). A search of the herbarium of William Sherard (1659-1728) in Oxford, or the herbarium of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) at the Natural History Museum, London, may locate the other parts of the specimen.

References

Harris SA 2016. Illustrations in the Morisonian Herbarium. Oxford Plant Systematics 22: 10-11.

Ogilvie BW 2006. The science of describing. Natural history in Renaissance Europe. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.