Folio 10v Plant Identification

[Skoove]

My opinion (not original, this line of thought is certainly very old) is that all plants in the Voynich Manuscript are intentionally chimeric or fantastic and there is no practical way of making a certain identification of any of them. They may resemble this or that, but the resemblance is never perfect and never good enough to make any conclusions.

I largely agree with you, especially when it comes to the roots. Much like with many medieval bestiaries, I don't think the illustrators had ever seen most of the things that they were drawing. That said, common plant species must have been routinely seen by the illustrators (unless they lived in a 'Silo' type environment). 

I would say that most of the plants in Herbal A are too generic or too fantastical to be real but some are quite plausible (which doesn't mean that they actually are meant to be any given plant).

I think maybe it might be possible to figure out which plants in general the artist was familiar with and what were the inspirations for a particular plant image, this could yield some useful data.

I'm not sure I agree with this because of how widespread plant species are around different parts of the world. I think that only being able to pinpoint a specific genus or species would provide a localised enough point to be useful.