Plant pictures as composite images

[Linda]

It seems to me that some plants show somewhat non-natural growth due to the fact that they have been removed from their natural habitat and delivered to someone in the form of bare roots or cuttings of some kind, for further growth experiments. Some seem like they could have been derived from cuttings of cuttings, i.e. a slice of root rather than the whole root. Perhaps the piece that arrived had to be shared amongst interested parties or parts were distributed along the way. It seems to me as though the plants are drawn once they have resumed flowering. So a plant prone to hardy regrowth may show multiple shoots, whereas one not so hardy may only show small growth coming from a larger rootstock. It may be that other experiments were done, such as today is done to create rainbow roses and the like. This may explain some of the strange colourations. I have noticed that sometimes the leaves seem to be drawn as what they look like after they are taken from the plant, rather than what they look like while growing on the plant, as though the completed drawing is a composite of the plant in various states, during growth, after wilting, dried, from memory, etc. and that this may explain some of the discrepancies as well, insofar as their identification. They may also be hybrids, I know that I myself have created different versions of plants from proximity growth, i.e. natural cross pollination, in both Silene (I have an inflata that has pink petals instead of white, I believe it happened because I once had a pink silene garden species growing nearby the native inflata) and also have had various versions of gloriosa daisies from the mixing of garden varieties with native black eyed susans, the resulting plants were some with pointy petals, some with round, various combinations of rust and yellow colouration making them look very different indeed from what I started with. Someone doing purposeful cross pollination between delivered plants from various regions and their own local versions might come up with some very interesting plants indeed. I found it very interesting to find that beetroots as we know them now (root veggie) did not really exist for long before the time of the manuscript, but were developed through human selection in the time since, perhaps it was initially from the mixing with another compatible species from some far off place, is that what is being portrayed perhaps?