Is it worthwhile actually trying to identify the plants in the VM?

[crezac]

David,
Since no-one else has added, may I say that I think it is worthwhile *after* you are confident that you know the sort of images you're dealing with. 

And I'd add to Diane's observation that it's also important, and sometimes difficult, to remain objective in your identification.  There are a number of people who have sites with "identifications", and even an app on the Google Play Store that claims to identify many of the plants.  Looking through both there are some that have all the attributes of the drawing that I would call strong matches - although strong doesn't mean it can't also be wrong.  There are others that bear a passing resemblance at best.  Trying to do identify the image just to be the first one to throw out a suggestion isn't the best strategy -- asking a Ouija board for page numbers in Hortica would probably work as well.  Assuming you're working with a herbal, plants from Mexico or limiting your search in some other way is probably a smarter move.  But even there, if you get a few strong matches and a lot of partials it doesn't prove anything.  And if you get a few strong matches and none of them have medicinal properties or come from Mexico you might want to start fresh.

Moving away from plants slightly, look at a few of the guides to wild mushrooms in a bookstore or library.  One of the reasons for these books is that many mushrooms that are edible look very similar to others that are poisonous. This is true of books about plants too.  One of the reason they are written is that many plants look very similar to each other.  Our brains look for patterns so using a guide to mushrooms to train your brain to see patterns helps you avoid the toadstools.  But it works both ways.  If you had a big Swiss Cheese plant in the lobby at your first job or your grandmother had a water garden when you were growing up you'll see different patterns in the illustrations of VMS than a 14th-century German monk or a 15th-century Italian artist.  Their experiences and culture will be different than yours so their brains are programmed differently.

These aren't new observations and they are pretty obvious anyway.  The thing that needs some emphasis though is that you can't turn the little pattern matchers in your brain on and off., it's difficult to override them, and usually they do their thing without you even being aware of it.  Rather than seek an "identification" it's probably better to say "this illustration has characteristics A,B,C,D and here's a list of plants with those characteristics or some of those characteristics."  After you've done that for maybe 20% of the plant images you can start looking at all your possibilities and see what core commonalities you can find.  If you don't you run the risk of being like the SETI researcher who wrote some software to scrub his raw data before looking for signals and when he was done not only did he not have a signal, he didn't have any data left either.

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My personal collection of plant ids is here - I made the list not because I think I am right, but because I hope that other researchers may find some useful ideas in it and come up with better ones in the future. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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EllieV, Great list and collection. Is there a reason why you didn't include f25v? Plenty of opinions around, also on your blog, and it is discussed here now too (under 'discussion' is a thread on a suggestion for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as Mandrake). 
I'd value your opinion if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is too complicated a case for plant ID...

Hi juerenw, I believe the mandrake is one fol. 44r. Few people independently suggested that to me. Edith Sherwood suggested it. Does anybody knows who came up with the mandrake for 44r first? I have prepared images to post about it. It took me some time, but I think I have a story about it. In German the mandrake was called 'little hanged man' - it was believed that the mandrake root-person was formed by the hanged man's blood coming down the gallows - I think fol. 44r represents drops of blood coming down gallows beam (you can see the stem of the plant has edges like beam) - this is why the root-man is missing - it is still forming [url=https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f44r/0.5/0.5/2.50]https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f44r/0.5/0.5/2.50

Hi David, the above mandrake example shows how studying the VMs plants may help with more info about the author and maybe the text. Another example - Traveler's joy points to Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland and the plant with rhombuses in its petals point to German speaking author. The text maybe Latin or other language of course, but I think German was one of the languages spoken by the author.
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My suggestion for 44r would be tarragon.  I believe the French for the name translates to "little dragon" which would explain why he's in the illustration.