Folio 10v Plant Identification

[Bernd]

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 think maybe it might be possible to figure out which plants in general the artist was familiar with (or which are conspicuously absent from the manuscript) and what were the inspirations for a particular plant image, this could yield some useful data.

I know a lot about plants (according to the Forum's reputation system at least  ) and I strongly agree. I would further add that we should not generalize. Some plants may very well have been fully (and badly?) copied from another herbal or even live or herbalised plant material like f9v , the majority however indeed appears to be a mixture of different sources + the author's own ideas. We should not look at this from a modern scientific perspective but through the lens of a 15th century 'artist' possibly one who himself had very little idea what the plants depicted in his sources looked like in real life.