One of the best plants in my garden is spiderwort\u2014Tradescantia virginiana.\u00a0 The flowers are a vibrant shade of blue purple and have three petals apiece.\u00a0 Perched at the tops of relatively stout stalks, the blooms appear in clusters.\u00a0 Their lives are short but beautiful–individual flowers last only one day apiece.\u00a0 The long slender leaves curl at the ends, springing out from around the flower clusters.\u00a0 Tradescantia is incandescent in any situation, but seems especially so because it blooms in part shade.\u00a0 Hybrids, like those in the Andersonia group, have broadened the available colors to blue; white, with blue or purple in the center; and pinkish purple.\u00a0 All form nice clumps when they are happy and those clumps can be divided and spread around to create little corners of happiness all around the garden.<\/p>\n
At this time of year I can go down to my upper back garden and see spiderwort any time I want.\u00a0 When it is dark or rainy outside I can also see it leaping off the pages of The Green Florilegium<\/em>, a book originally created in the mid seventeenth century by a German artist, Hans Simon Holtzbecker.\u00a0 In Holtzbecker\u2019s day, spiderwort was a new plant, having arrived from its native America in 1629.\u00a0 Possession of spiderwort would have been the exclusive domain of wealthy plant lovers.\u00a0 At least one of them\u2014the unknown individual who commissioned The Green Florilegium<\/em>\u2014undoubtedly enjoyed seeing this hardy immigrant plant elegantly immortalized on parchment.<\/p>\n My copy of The Green Florilegium<\/em> contains a facsimile of the original, plus a forward with details about florilegia in general and The Green Florilegium<\/em> in particular. \u00a0The only certainties that surround the book are the identity of the artist, the approximate time of its creation and the fact that it was bound in striking green velour with gilt edges.\u00a0 The name of the artist\u2019s patron has been lost, as has the exact publication date.\u00a0 Most recently it has been stored at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark, where it was restored in 2011 by conservator Christian Balleby Jensen.<\/p>\n The plant paintings were executed in gouache, similar to watercolor, but more opaque.\u00a0 Like all good botanical art, the flower illustrations are faithful to the botanical specimens, but also have a sense of life and movement.\u00a0 The vast majority of garden books are arranged seasonally, and The Green Florilegium<\/em> is no exception.\u00a0 Its first pages portray crocuses, with subsequent illustrations depicting other spring flowers, like snowdrops and dog-tooth violets.\u00a0 It pleases me to see the same \u201cgranny\u2019s bonnet\u201d double columbine that I grow in corners of my back garden in full bloom on the pages of a work created well over three hundred years ago..<\/p>\n As befits a book conceived not long after the 1638 apex of Dutch tulipomania, the Florilegium<\/em> contains many portraits of flamed, striped and splashed \u201cbroken\u201d tulips of the type that caused the infamous seventeenth century speculative bubble.\u00a0 One of the brown and yellow-flamed tulips looks a lot like \u2018Absalon\u2019, listed in the current Old House Gardens bulb catalog and said to be from 1780.\u00a0 Another resembles \u2018Golden Standard\u2019 from 1760.\u00a0 It is exciting and inspiring to find these connections.<\/p>\n Lilies, with their swirling, sometimes reflexed petals come alive.\u00a0 I especially admire the scarlet Turk\u2019s cap lily\u2014Lilium chalcedonicum\u2014because a few of the extremely reflexed petals appear to hold the others in a tight embrace.\u00a0 The carnations stand out for the exquisite renderings of their intricate stripes, swirls and edgings.\u00a0 I love seeing carnations when they were regarded as miraculous instead of ubiquitous.<\/p>\n In her introduction, Danish botanical historian Hanne Kolind Poulson distinguishes between florilegia and herbals.\u00a0 Herbals often contained botanical illustrations or woodcuts, but their purpose was didactic and the text, describing how specific herbs could be used, was as important as the pictures.\u00a0 Florilegia, on the other hand, were all about the pictures, created to catalog specific plant collections and celebrate the patron\/collector\u2019s taste, sophistication and wealth.\u00a0 As recently as 2008, England\u2019s Prince Charles published the limited edition Highgrove Florilegium, <\/em>filled with various artists\u2019 depictions of the plants grown on the prince\u2019s Highgrove Estate.<\/p>\n A book like The Green Florilegium<\/em> is and was about inspiration.\u00a0 The plants on its pages sing of history, art and horticulture.\u00a0 They bear witness to the colorful exploits of plant hunters like the two John Tradescants\u2014older and younger\u2014for whom my lovely spiderworts were named.\u00a0 At times when I can\u2019t be out in the garden, listening to the distinctive voices of my plants, I can sit in the house in the company of violas and larkspurs that dropped their last petals more than three centuries ago.\u00a0 It is the closest I will ever come to time travel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the best plants in my garden is spiderwort\u2014Tradescantia virginiana.\u00a0 The flowers are a vibrant shade of blue purple and have three petals apiece.\u00a0 Perched at the tops of relatively stout stalks, the blooms appear in clusters.\u00a0 Their lives are short but beautiful–individual flowers last only one day apiece.\u00a0 The long slender leaves curl … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,3,5],"tags":[583,581,584,585,582],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-botanical-illustration","tag-florilegia","tag-historic-botanical-prints","tag-pictures-of-flowers","tag-the-green-florilegium"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":836,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions\/836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}