Are we taking the pictures too literally?

[Scarecrow]

You do have good and agreeable points. My intention was to bring out another point of view, and not to debate wheter or not the plants are identifiable or real.

Think of the many strange roots. Those aren't brought in from other plants - no plant has roots that look like a feline, or two mammals facing each other, or an eagle, or two human faces. Certain flowers and leaves have been manipulated beyond reasonable natural possibilities as well.

Yes, I've been thinking those strange roots and maybe they could be some kind of mnemonics to the audience indicate of which root we are talking about here, in case of possibile ambiguity, i.e., "This is the root we call the feline root","this is the bad face root" and so on. In that way they could have omitted the proper names of the plants and plant parts from the text, which would further help to conceal and protect the MS. The topic idea sound me more realistic than just single plant page, and I may be wrong, but there is not much of evidence of proper names in the VMS, a lot of unique words though vs just once words. Would the rather rigid glyph order allow for proper names?

To put it another way, if the VM simply recombined parts of existing plants, it would still not look as bizarre as it does. Even if it combines parts of different plants in some occasions (maybe it does, I don't know), it seems clear to me that one or more other transformative principles have a greater impact on our inability to identify the plants.

No, I don't think VM is simply of anything. I think some, not all, the plants could be recombinations. In some cases there might not be but one plant for one topic so no recombination needed. But I do agree that there could be something else or more to it, concealment and transformation. On the other hand, why they would have left the plants as clues..