Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

I don't think the plants are fake. Some are quite naturalistic and identifiable. Some are very stylized, but this might be for mnemonic reasons. I would not write them off as fake plants. They are probably just drawn in a way that is culturally and mnemonically meaningful to whoever drew them.

There is no proof that there is a "sunflower" in the VMS. There are a number of plants that look like the VMS "sunflower" that are not part of the sunflower family.

The text accompanying the plants might be meaningless. Or it might be in a system that isn't yet understood. I would not assume it's meaningless until we have explored all the possible ways the text could be constructed, and that is work in progress.

Please note that I did not say that all the plants are fake but only the "majority" of them. For example, I have no complaints about the water lily, a native American plant, on f2v. Back in the beginning, I thought they were all real plants with many of the drawings representing plant species that are now extinct, but with the retreat from the Amazon rainforest to Mexico, it became far less likely that the VMS was a serious effort to catalog and accurately describe real plants.

Though surely many of the plant drawings were based on artist recollections of real plants, their objective appears to have been to provide added protection for the sacred text encoded into the deep text pages. Thus, the plants can be arbitrarily real, partially real, or completely fake, and the accompanying text in all cases is likely meaningless. Like you, I await evidence to the contrary.