Was the VM a failure?

[oshfdk]

I would assume abstraction rather than deception here. It was probably intended that the plants in the plant section, for example, cannot be assigned to real plants with certainty. Nevertheless, the first section is a plant section as can be seen in many other manuscripts. This is true even if the plants in the VMS cannot be clearly assigned to any known tradition. It seems as if the author wanted to prevent plant names from being deduced from the coded text ( usually first "word" ? ) at any point.

What is the use of a plant illustration if it won't let the reader identify the plant?