[split] Are there trees in the VMS?

[-JKP-]

I agree that at first sight the plants look mostly like herbs, though this is hard to tell for sure since we have no indication of scale.

The layout of the text might show a hint of the plants' size too. For example, it would have been no problem to reduce the size of the plant on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. until the layout looks like on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . So it seems important that the plant on f30r is extended to full height ( or not on f31v ).

...

It might, but... viola is a pretty small plant and it takes up a big chunk of the page, so there's not much additional room to use the space on the page to draw a tree to scale compared to the other drawings. And trees aren't just bigger, they are proportioned differently (and they branch in ways that many small plants do not) and there's not much evidence of those traits in most of the VMS plants.

If there is attention to scale (I think there is, to some extent), it appears to go from medium-small to small, not from small to really large, as in a tree, with the exception of the two that more obviously appear to be trees (the host trees for ivy and dodder).