Plant pictures as composite images

[-JKP-]

Some of them have been drawn from dried plants.

I've mentioned this a few times, how some parts of the plant are more fragile than others when they are dried, how some parts change color more than others and how the petals are often the most fragile and the part that often changes the most in both color and shape.


I'm pretty confident that many of the VMS plants were drawn from dried specimens. It's not just that the leaves have been flattened and oriented toward the viewer (plants drawn from dried specimens have that certain flattened uncluttered look that's different from plants drawn from life), but there's confirmation of this likelihood from stains in the manuscript that look like part of a dried plant (I didn't actually spot these stains until a couple of years after I noticed some of the plants appeared to be drawn from dried specimens).

The first screensnap looks like the residue from two bell-shaped flower heads that appear to have been pressed against the vellum. This is not a stain from the other side.

The second one, I'm less sure of, but it is on the same page. It may be a compressed calyx, with quite a bit of the plant matter still there but parts of it look like a glue blob or white paint blob, so I don't know what happened here, perhaps an attempt to adhere it to the vellum? or perhaps a part of the petal remains or... perhaps this isn't a plant at all, maybe it's a blob of wax?