Was the VM a failure?

[bi3mw]

I'm not sure I understand the use case. They will have a picture of something that is definitely not a dandelion, but the text will say that you have to assume it was a dandelion. Why have the picture at all?

Because pictures of plants, if you know what they are supposed to represent, can contain a certain amount of information about their structure (roots, stems, leaves, flowers). Even in "regular" herbal manuscripts, the illustrations are often very difficult to recognize, even without intentional abstraction. For example, I wouldn't trust myself to recognize most of the plants in the Circa Instans tradition in nature. But the medieval reader had nothing better, he often had to orientate himself by a single characteristic feature of a plant (e.g. roots or flowers). The rest was then more or less irrelevant. So there can be no question of a realistic depiction anyway.