What is special about Voynich plants?

[-JKP-]

The first three points are clear to me (and also match some of Koen's observations).
Could you please specify which illustrations present the features in your fourth point?

I guess that one is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., that was discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

That would be one example.

93r is another example.  There are red lines which are especially prominent in the roots, but also found in the stem.

More examples would be 4r, 2r, 13r, 35r, 38v (not a complete list).

2v has red lines in the stem, but they have been painted over with green, so you have to look carefully to see them.

14r is interesting, because the central stem is filled in entirely with red, but the smaller branches only have thin red lines in them, with no attempt to fill them in entirely.

47v is another interesting example, because the top of the root is "highlighted" with a red line, yet we find basically "the same" root at the top of 102r2 but without the red, possibly suggesting that the red is not an intrinsic part of how the root is supposed to appear visually, but may instead indicate an "emphasis" in one case that is not present in the other case.

Good examples of dotted lines would be along the edges of the leaves in 3r and around the top of the root in 45v.  In both of these cases the dotted lines seem to be emphasizing a particular type of curvature (though I'm not certain that they actually serve that purpose).

What I would like to know about these features is:

1) Can they be found in other European herbals?

2) Is there some aspect of real plants that these features could plausibly be taken as an attempt to depict with visual accuracy?

If the answer to both of the above is "no", then it seems we have a common property of the VMS botanical illustrations that represents a unique form of symbolic representation (which would seem to imply that whoever composed the illustrations possessed a "botanical theory" of some kind, as stated in my previous post).

Many of the examples you cited above I believe are red or reddish-brown for the same reason the leaves are painted green and the flowers are white, yellowish, blue, etc. That's the color of the plant. Red and reddish-brown are very common colors for stems and roots in the plant world. Sometimes even very bright red.

Do other herbals have red or reddish roots or stems? Yes. Some of them do.


I haven't had time to write up my observations on the way the plants are drawn but in some cases the paint looks like it was slobbed on by someone in a hurry, not the same person who painted others in a more careful way, but there are also some where the "scratchy" paint looks like it was applied that way to create a lighter color (the painter was not skilled at painting but did mix the colors and did try to create in-between colors by sometimes laying it on with a lighter touch). You can particularly see this in plants where the paint has been mixed to create different shades of green.