Reading a Nineteenth-Century Plate Honestly

The chromolithographs the archive holds are among the finest botanical illustrations ever printed — but they were made to teach and to sell, and they idealise. Flowers are shown at an impossible peak; awkward asymmetries are quietly corrected; a plant’s worst habit is rarely its portrait.

We keep them for their beauty and their colour record, but we read them against the pressed sheet precisely because the sheet does not flatter. The living plant is messier than its plate, and the archive’s job is to hold both truths on the same folder.