The VMS pictures of
Tragopogon and
Viola are also naturalistic. I think those three in particular are probably taken from life. We know that at least some people in the classic and medieval periods gathered fresh herbs and brought them in to be drawn because it's mentioned in manuscripts and there are sometimes drawings of "sages" copying plants that are in vases on the table in front of them. Most manuscripts appear to be copied from others, but some of the exemplars are naturalistic. The
Juliana Anicia drawings are good, so someone at an early time actually LOOKED at plants and tried to render them realistically.
Consider that
Viola tricolor (and its two or three look-alikes) were NOT included in most herbal manuscripts before 1460. Most of the early herbal manuscripts used
Viola odorata rather than
V. tricolor. V. tricolor includes palmate leaves. Most violas (including most of those in plant manuscripts) have heart-shaped or sagittate leaves.
The
Egerton 747 drawing has some indication of texture on the rhizome but it's not scientifically correct, it's just a texture. For its time, the VMS rhizome is scientifically quite good. I am doubtful that the VMS water lily rhizome is copied from other herbals unless there's some 14th-century exemplar that has been lost that had input from a real botanist. I think the person who drew VMS 2v knew (and cared) about plants. The VMS leaf margins show the same care and attention. Other plant manuscripts pay very little attention to correct leaf margins. Even if they get the smooth/serrated distinction correct, they don't pay attention to the details of the serrations and the VMS does.
To slot a plant into an herbal tradition, you need to compare plants that are drawn in completely different ways or in weird ways. For example, oregano is drawn in many different ways (which makes it easy to spot which group it belongs to) and basilica is drawn in weird ways (three snakes intertwined for the roots is usually one of the English manuscripts, basil is drawn in a pot in others, and like a tree in still others).
These are related traditions, but there is a clear difference in the two lines of evolution... on the left, the fruits are amber clusters and they hang down, on the right, they are round, red, and they point up. In real life, the flowers are greenish-yellow clusters that hang down. When they mature, some of the fruits are reddish, some are amber or amber mixed with red and the bigger they get, the more they droop. In a crude way, both drawings are correct, even if they are not the same:
If you try to slot the VMS into a verbal tradition based on a plant that MOST people draw the same way, then the similarity may be circumstantial, so it needs to be a
group of plants that follow the same templates, or a plant drawn in distinctive ways by the different groups. The mnemonic roots and leaves seem more similar to the "alchemical" herbals than the more naturalistic ones. The VMS might not fit any one tradition, it might be drawn from a variety of sources (including life).