curly herbal

[-JKP-]

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I noticed that a lot of images of herbals have a distinctive curl.

such as

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and

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and

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That reminded me of the image You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It's not quite the same, because the curl is there inside the stem, but perhaps there are other better examples.

It's not surprising that images of branches (such as those in the examples above) were drawn with a "curl". When you pull a branch off a tree,, especially a young branch, the bark peels off in a strip as the branch is pulled, and then curls when it is nipped from the main branch, so the convention of drawing a branch with a curled end is probably inspired by life and might even be a way of saying, symbolically, "this is a branch, not a full plant".
There are also many curls in the VMS. Many of the roots are curled, one even looks like the curls at the top of classical pillars, and the tendrils, not surprisingly, are curled as well.
In the VMS, the curling of the roots (and sometimes the leaf tips) may be mnemonic. It's also possible that some of them are stylistic (the illustrator may have had a penchant for curled shapes).