The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

Absolutely yes -- it could be a coincidence. There are many books of herbs from that era. There may be books also including stars.   And almost all of them include "other things", but, in particular, things relating to alchemisty. It would not be at all surprising for another book to match that description equally well.

But how many of them depicted "exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany" (Barschius to Kircher 1639)? Given how unrealistic many illustrations were in herbals, they had to be really weird (as many in the VM are) to be called exotic...

Good point -- I missed collecting that reference into the set that I itemized (previously) for where descriptive references were made.
And it does help to narrow the description.

We should be careful on the precise words used, by the way, as they are all translations from an old version of Latin. The actual word used was not the English word "exotic", but the Latin word "peregrinae", which can simply mean foreign or non-native. 

The English translation you are quoting was obtained by Philip Neal (not a linguist) from the translation of another person (I forget his name) whose expertise and effort on those letters is unclear. (He later published a book about some of his Latin translation work and curiously omitted any mention of those letters.)