Water Lily folio 2v stalk remedy

[Sam G]

This thought crossed my mind when I began to realize at least some of the VMS plants appear to be drawn from herbarium (flattened) specimens...

Could you elaborate on your reasons for thinking this?

Is it possible the illustrator worked from a dry specimen and thought the little jug-shaped Asarum flower was the calyx and "invented" the missing petals? I'm not proposing this as a theory. I'm just putting the idea out there as food for thought.

I know very little about botany, but what I've thought about the illustrations (including and especially the non-herbal illustrations) in the VMS since I first started studying it is that they have been drawn largely on the basis of text descriptions. So in the case of the 2v illustration, perhaps someone saw one of the species you suggest it might be, and described it by saying something along the lines of: "it is like a water lily, but the flower is like that of a (insert plant here)". Then later, someone else attempted to draw this, and the result is what we find in the VMS.

I wonder if you think this idea could account for some of the VMS herbal illustrations. Obviously this idea would appear to contradict the idea that the illustrations are accurate drawings from nature, but perhaps the illustrations were produced by a combination of these different methods. The quality and overall "character" of the illustrations does seem to vary considerably.