The fennel-leaved marguerite of Tenerife: white daisies over a haze of blue-grey, feathery foliage.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8644 · 1916. From £10, A4 to A2.

A South African daisy of startling pink, drawn at Kew in 1915, and today a familiar escapee on the Isles of Scilly.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8624 · 1915. From £10, A4 to A2.

The wild ancestor of the New Guinea impatiens sold by the million as summer bedding, a forest plant with big flat flowers and glossy, often bronzed leaves.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8247 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

A South American sorrel with clover leaves that fold at dusk and a long summer of rose-pink flowers, now naturalised along the Cornish lanes.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 6748 · 1884. From £10, A4 to A2.

A kangaroo paw dressed in black and lime-green velvet, the only species of its genus, from the sandplains north of Perth.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4291 · 1847. From £10, A4 to A2.

A candelabra primula from the high mountains of Taiwan, its magenta flowers stacked in tiers up a tall, leafless stem.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8606 · 1915. From £10, A4 to A2.

A Himalayan woodlander with umbrella leaves, a single pale flower and a scarlet fruit like a plum, whose roots yield a drug now used against cancer.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8850 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

A fruiting branch of the Surinam cherry, its ribbed berries ripening from yellow through orange to scarlet, drawn at Kew by Matilda Smith.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8599 · 1915. From £10, A4 to A2.

The white-flowered wild peony of northern China, parent of almost every herbaceous peony in our gardens, as it was first drawn for English readers in 1815.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 1756 · 1815. From £10, A4 to A2.

Not an ivy at all but a grape relative from East Asia, whose three-pointed leaves turn scarlet in autumn and whose tendrils cling with tiny adhesive pads.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8287 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

A twining vine of the Indo-Malayan forests with laurel leaves and lavender-blue trumpets, drunk as a tea in Thailand and grown in Victorian stove houses.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4985 · 1857. From £10, A4 to A2.

The only orchid grown as food: a climbing vine of the Mexican forests whose cured seed pods are the vanilla of every kitchen in the world.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 7167 · 1891. From £10, A4 to A2.

A hibiscus grown for its leaves, splashed with cream, pink and crimson, brought from the New Hebrides in 1861 and lithographed at Ghent for the Flore des serres.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe, plate 1556 · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

The scarlet fuchsia-flowered begonia from the Bolivian Andes, shown at Paris in 1867 and figured by van Houtte the same year, the parent of every tuberous begonia in a hanging basket.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe, plate 1725 · 1867. From £10, A4 to A2.

The golden-rayed lily that stopped the show when it first flowered in England in 1862, given a double fold-out plate by Louis van Houtte in the Flore des serres.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe, plate 1528–1531 · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

Von Siebold's Otaksa hydrangea, the mophead of a thousand seaside gardens, named for the woman he left behind in Nagasaki, figured by van Houtte on a double plate.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe, plate 1752–1753 · 1867. From £10, A4 to A2.

A double white clematis from the gardens of Japan, scented of hawthorn, figured in the Flore des serres in the year Robert Fortune sent it to Europe.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe, plate 1555 · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

A white, frilled, scented rhododendron from the hills of Burma, grown as an epiphyte in the trees there and in the cool greenhouse here, figured for the Flore des serres in 1863.

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

The national plant of Malta, a woody knapweed with fleshy leaves that grows nowhere on Earth but the limestone sea cliffs of Malta and Gozo.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8508 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

A compact evergreen daphne from the mountains of western China whose purple-and-white flowers scent the air in late winter and again in autumn.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8855 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

An African shrub whose flowers look like small blue butterflies in flight, four pale wings and a violet body with arching stamens for antennae.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8235 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

A low Western Australian shrub with prickly, twice-divided leaves and hanging red toothbrush flowers, parent of the most-planted grevillea in the world.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8510 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

A banksia from the granite coast around Albany, with leaves that look bitten off at the tip and flower spikes of yellow or wine-red, drawn by W. J. Hooker in 1828.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 2803 · 1828. From £10, A4 to A2.

A tiny China rose, the ancestor of every miniature rose, drawn by John Curtis in 1815 and named for the botanical artist Mary Lawrance.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 1762 · 1815. From £10, A4 to A2.

A compact, scaly-leaved rhododendron from the mountains of western China, its magenta-purple trusses a legacy of the great plant hunters.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8620 · 1915. From £10, A4 to A2.

The nearest thing to a blue rhododendron, named for the Irish customs officer Augustine Henry who found it in the hills of Hubei.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8497 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

An evergreen magnolia from Yunnan with the largest leaves of any hardy evergreen in Britain and creamy bowl flowers that open at dusk and last two nights.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8282 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

The purple lily magnolia of Chinese gardens, one of the first to flower in France, painted by Redouté from the Empress Josephine's plant for Ventenat's Jardin de la Malmaison.

Jardin de la Malmaison, plate 24 · 1803. From £10, A4 to A2.

Hooker's 'noblest of the species': a rhododendron tree of Sikkim with leaves a foot long, silver beneath, and trusses of two dozen creamy flowers, from the Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya.

The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, plate IX · 1849. From £10, A4 to A2.

The first plate of the book that started the rhododendron craze: a tree-dwelling rhododendron with lemon-scented flowers the size of lilies, found by Joseph Hooker in Sikkim in 1848.

The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, plate I · 1849. From £10, A4 to A2.

The pink tulip tree of the Himalaya, which flowers on bare branches in March with blooms a foot across, drawn from Cathcart's Indian artists for Hooker's Illustrations of Himalayan Plants.

Illustrations of Himalayan Plants, plate IV · 1855. From £10, A4 to A2.

An angel's trumpet from the Andes, its hanging golden flowers a foot long and scented at night, drawn for Paxton's Magazine of Botany in 1842 from the first plant to flower in England.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1842. From £10, A4 to A2.

Siebold's clematis, its cream sepals around a boss of purple petaloid stamens like a passion flower, brought from Japan in 1836 and drawn for Paxton's Magazine within two years.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1838. From £10, A4 to A2.

The showy lily of Japan, white flushed with crimson and spotted like a trout, brought out of Nagasaki by von Siebold and drawn for Paxton's Magazine in its first years in England.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1838. From £10, A4 to A2.

The long-tubed scarlet fuchsia of the Mexican mountains, the sensation of the greenhouses in 1838 and a parent of the big garden fuchsias, drawn the year after it reached England for Paxton's Magazine.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1838. From £10, A4 to A2.

The orchid that started the orchid craze, found in Brazil in 1818 and lost again for seventy years, drawn for Paxton's Magazine when every collection in England wanted one.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1838. From £10, A4 to A2.

The first tropical pitcher plant known to Europe, with its leaf-tips grown into lidded jugs that drown insects, drawn from the plant in the stove at Chatsworth for Paxton's Magazine of Botany.

Paxton's Magazine of Botany · 1838. From £10, A4 to A2.

A carnivorous plant from Brazil with orchid-like purple flowers, which hunts underground with bladder traps that snap shut faster than the eye can follow.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8516 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

The yellow pond lily of the American West, whose waxy globe flowers have a dozen sepals and whose seeds, the wokas, were a staple of the Klamath people.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8852 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

The giant waterlily of the Amazon, named for Queen Victoria, whose ribbed leaves inspired the Crystal Palace and whose flowers change sex overnight: the open flower, from Hooker's 1847 account.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4276 · 1847. From £10, A4 to A2.

A Philippine aroid with velvet-green arrow leaves veined in silver, the wild parent of the houseplant sold today as Alocasia 'Frydek'.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8522 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

A staple root crop of tropical Asia with a flower like a frilled maroon bell that stinks of carrion, drawn by W. J. Hooker in 1828 as Arum campanulatum.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 2812 · 1828. From £10, A4 to A2.

The corpse flower: the largest unbranched flower spike in the world, which first bloomed outside Sumatra at Kew in 1889, and which Matilda Smith drew for this plate.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 7153 · 1891. From £10, A4 to A2.

A savanna cycad from West Africa, a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs that hides its stem underground to live through grass fires.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8232 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

A single-stemmed tree aloe of the southern African bushveld, armoured with spines and crowned in winter by a candelabra of orange flowers that feed the sunbirds.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8484 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

A tree-sized cactus of the high desert, built of jointed, knobbly cylinders, with magenta flowers in summer and yellow fruits that hang on all winter.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8290 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

A plant that disguises itself as a pebble: two fused leaves with a window on top, flowering yellow from the slit between them, drawn by Joseph Hooker himself.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 6077 · 1874. From £10, A4 to A2.

The desert plant that grows only two leaves in a life that can last a thousand years, drawn by Walter Hood Fitch when it first astonished Kew in 1863.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 5369 · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

A Mexican echeveria with channelled, red-edged leaves and arching sprays of coral bells, drawn by Fitch when it flowered at Kew in 1857.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4986 · 1857. From £10, A4 to A2.

A small East Asian tree whose starry white 'flowers' are really four bracts, followed in autumn by strawberry-like red fruits and burgundy leaves.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8833 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

The New Zealand lacebark, or houhere: an evergreen of the mallow family with white starry flowers and an inner bark of lace that Māori wove into cloth.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8843 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

A rainforest conifer from Fiji with broad leathery leaves that look nothing like a pine's, from a family that was old when the dinosaurs were young.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8512 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

The madrone of the Pacific coast, an evergreen heather relative with cinnamon-red bark that peels to reveal smooth green beneath, white bell flowers and orange berries.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8249 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

The temple pine of northern China, whose bark flakes into a patchwork of grey, green, cream and chalk-white that outshines its flowers.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8240 · 1909. From £10, A4 to A2.

The oyamel fir of the Mexican highlands, cut for church festivals since colonial times and the winter roost of millions of monarch butterflies.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 6753 · 1884. From £10, A4 to A2.

A woodland bulb from the Balkans and the Black Sea coast of Turkey, with green bells flushed bronze beneath a collar of three leaves.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8865 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

A smooth lavender-blue iris with a golden beard from the mountains of Central Asia, found by the Dutch bulb firm Van Tubergen's collectors in 1913.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8844 · 1920. From £10, A4 to A2.

The Siskiyou iris of Oregon and California: pale yellow petals pencilled with maroon, held above stiff, glossy evergreen leaves.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8640 · 1915. From £10, A4 to A2.

An apricot-orange Turk's-cap lily from the Yangtze gorges, found by Augustine Henry in 1888 and one of the easiest lilies ever to reach a garden.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 7177 · 1891. From £10, A4 to A2.

A South African blood lily that explodes into a scarlet sphere of two hundred flowers in summer, named for the Natal artist Katherine Saunders who sent it to Kew.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 6778 · 1884. From £10, A4 to A2.

Lima's own flower: a golden daffodil-like bulb that blooms when the winter fog greens the hills above the city, drawn by Sydenham Edwards in 1809.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 1224 · 1809. From £10, A4 to A2.

The bird of paradise flower from the Cape, named at Kew for Queen Charlotte, painted for Thornton's Temple of Flora with its orange crest and blue tongue against a dark sky.

The Temple of Flora · 1804. From £10, A4 to A2.

The sacred lotus of India and Egypt, painted by Peter Henderson for Thornton's Temple of Flora as 'The Sacred Egyptian Bean', with a pyramid in the distance and a leaf cupping water like silver.

The Temple of Flora · 1804. From £10, A4 to A2.

The American Turk's-cap lily, painted by Philip Reinagle for the first part of Thornton's Temple of Flora in 1799, with a classical landscape and a ruined temple behind.

The Temple of Flora · 1799. From £10, A4 to A2.

The most famous plate in the most extravagant flower book ever printed: a cactus that opens one enormous scented flower at midnight, painted against a moonlit church tower whose clock stands at twelve.

The Temple of Flora · 1800. From £10, A4 to A2.

The dragon arum of Greece, a maroon spathe a metre tall smelling of carrion, painted for the Temple of Flora against a thunderstorm to match its temper.

The Temple of Flora · 1801. From £10, A4 to A2.

Thornton's group of florists' tulips, flamed and feathered by a virus nobody understood, painted by Philip Reinagle and engraved in mezzotint by Richard Earlom for The Temple of Flora.

The Temple of Flora · 1798. From £10, A4 to A2.

The true amaryllis, the Cape bulb that throws up pink scented trumpets on bare stems in autumn before a leaf appears, painted by Redouté for Les Liliacées.

Les Liliacées · 1806. From £10, A4 to A2.

The oldest cultivated lily, painted on frescoes at Knossos and carried by the Romans across Europe, as Redouté painted it for Les Liliacées, the grandest of his books.

Les Liliacées · 1808. From £10, A4 to A2.

The mourning iris, grey petals netted with black-purple and a black velvet patch on the falls, a Turkish garden flower of the sixteenth century painted by Redouté for the first volume of Les Liliacées.

Les Liliacées · 1802. From £10, A4 to A2.

A red and yellow garden tulip, the flower of the Ottoman court and the Dutch mania, painted by Redouté for the last volume of Les Liliacées in 1816.

Les Liliacées · 1816. From £10, A4 to A2.

The crown imperial, a metre of stem topped by a ring of orange bells under a tuft of leaves, brought from Constantinople in the 1570s and painted by Redouté for Les Liliacées.

Les Liliacées · 1806. From £10, A4 to A2.

The bunch-flowered narcissus of the Mediterranean, the sacred lily of China and the paperwhite of the winter windowsill, painted by Redouté for the first volume of Les Liliacées.

Les Liliacées · 1802. From £10, A4 to A2.

The great camellia of Yunnan in the form Captain Rawes brought from Canton in 1820, with the largest flowers in the genus, drawn at Bromley for the Botanical Register from the first plant to flower in England.

The Botanical Register, plate 1078 · 1827. From £10, A4 to A2.

The yellow-flowered magnolia of Georgia, the only yellow magnolia the nineteenth century knew and the ancestor of all the yellow magnolias bred since, drawn from the Loddiges nursery's tree in 1820.

The Botanical Cabinet, plate 474 · 1820. From £10, A4 to A2.

The alpenrose of the limestone Alps, the first rhododendron ever grown in Britain, in a small hand-coloured plate from the Loddiges nursery's Botanical Cabinet.

The Botanical Cabinet, plate 479 · 1820. From £10, A4 to A2.

The thornless Chinese climber named for Lady Banks, its sprays of small double white roses smelling of violets, drawn for the Botanical Register twelve years after it reached Kew from Canton.

The Botanical Register, plate 397 · 1819. From £10, A4 to A2.

The English bluebell drawn life-size for Flora Londinensis, William Curtis's record of the wild plants within ten miles of London, with the bulb, the flower and its dissected parts.

Flora Londinensis · 1779. From £10, A4 to A2.

The sweet violet of the hedge bank and the perfumer, drawn with its runners and roots for Flora Londinensis, the first great book of British wild flowers.

Flora Londinensis · 1777. From £10, A4 to A2.

The white crispum orchid of the Colombian cloud forest, the most coveted orchid of the Victorian age, painted by Henry Moon for the first plate of Sander's Reichenbachia.

Reichenbachia, plate 1 · 1888. From £10, A4 to A2.

A slipper orchid from the forest floor of Borneo with tortoiseshell leaves and a flag of a flower striped purple, found for Veitch in 1878 and lithographed by John Nugent Fitch for the Orchid Album.

The Orchid Album, plate 22 · 1882. From £10, A4 to A2.

The Himalayan orchid that filled Victorian cool houses with cascades of crystalline white flowers in the depths of winter.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 8477 · 1913. From £10, A4 to A2.

The bucket orchid, whose flower drowns a bee in perfume and lets it escape only past the pollen: the most elaborate trap in the orchid world, admired by Darwin.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 7692 · 1900. From £10, A4 to A2.

One of the first orchids ever bred by human hand, raised by John Dominy at Veitch's nursery in Exeter and flowered in 1859.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 5375 · 1863. From £10, A4 to A2.

The 'lost orchid': a slipper orchid that flowered once in Liverpool in 1857, vanished from the wild for fifty years, and had a £1,000 bounty on its rediscovery.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 5024 · 1857. From £10, A4 to A2.

An orchid whose flower head is a mop of up to a hundred straw-coloured blooms trailing threads like Medusa's hair, drawn by Fitch in 1857.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4977 · 1857. From £10, A4 to A2.

The white moon orchid of the Malay islands, ancestor of nearly every moth orchid sold today, drawn by Walter Hood Fitch soon after it first flowered in Britain.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 4297 · 1847. From £10, A4 to A2.

The orchid that started orchid mania: a flower like a butterfly in flight, which so enchanted the Duke of Devonshire in 1833 that he began the greatest orchid collection of the age.

Curtis's Botanical Magazine, plate 2795 · 1828. From £10, A4 to A2.

Plate 1 of A Curious Herbal: the dandelion, the commonest plant in England, drawn, engraved and coloured by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 to get her husband out of a debtors' prison.

A Curious Herbal, plate 1 · 1737. From £10, A4 to A2.

The mandrake, the most storied plant in the herbal, with its forked root and its legendary shriek, drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell from the plant itself rather than the legend.

A Curious Herbal, plate 364 · 1739. From £10, A4 to A2.

The pomegranate in flower and fruit from A Curious Herbal: the fruit of Persephone and the badge of Catherine of Aragon, in the herbal for the sake of its bitter rind.

A Curious Herbal, plate 145 · 1737. From £10, A4 to A2.

The orange tree in flower and fruit, a Chinese hybrid that reached Europe with the Portuguese and filled the orangeries of Blackwell's England, drawn, engraved and coloured by her for A Curious Herbal.

A Curious Herbal, plate 349 · 1739. From £10, A4 to A2.

The clove tree of the Moluccas, whose dried flower buds were worth more than gold in Blackwell's London, drawn, engraved and coloured by Elizabeth Blackwell for A Curious Herbal.

A Curious Herbal, plate 338 · 1739. From £10, A4 to A2.

The coffee shrub with its jasmine-scented flowers and red cherries, drawn, engraved and coloured by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1739, when London had been drinking coffee for ninety years and the plant itself was a rarity under glass.

A Curious Herbal, plate 337 · 1739. From £10, A4 to A2.

The food of the gods: the cacao tree with its pods growing straight from the trunk, source of the chocolate of the Maya, the Aztecs and everyone since.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1890. From £10, A4 to A2.

The tea plant, a camellia with a small white flower, which China kept to itself for two thousand years and Britain carried to India in 1848.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1890. From £10, A4 to A2.

Two spices from one fruit: the nutmeg seed in its scarlet lace of mace, from the tiny Banda Islands whose trees were once worth more than Manhattan.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1890. From £10, A4 to A2.

The autumn crocus whose three red stigmas are saffron, the most expensive spice on Earth, a plant that cannot set seed and has been passed from hand to hand since the Bronze Age.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1890. From £10, A4 to A2.

The hop vine whose cones bitter and preserve beer, drawn with its papery female cones and the golden lupulin dust that is the point of it.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1887. From £10, A4 to A2.

The foxglove of British woods and the drug that came from it: a century after William Withering taught doctors to use it for the heart, Köhler's atlas drew it for the pharmacy.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1887. From £10, A4 to A2.

The opium poppy as the German pharmacopoeia saw it in 1887: flower, capsule and seed in a chromolithograph from the most exacting atlas of medicinal plants ever made.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 1887. From £10, A4 to A2.

The two oddest fruits of the old English orchard, the medlar that must rot before it is eaten and the quince that must be cooked, painted together for the last plates of the Herefordshire Pomona.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate LXXVI · 1884. From £10, A4 to A2.

Bramley's Seedling, the English cooking apple, raised from a pip by a girl in Southwell in 1809 and still growing on its original tree, painted for the Herefordshire Pomona among the culinary apples.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate LXXIII · 1884. From £10, A4 to A2.

Three dessert pears of the nineteenth century, the Beurré Hardy, the Pitmaston Duchess and the Doyenné du Comice, painted from the fruit for the Herefordshire Pomona.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate XIII · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

Cox's Orange Pippin, the best-flavoured apple in the world, painted from the fruit beside the old Herefordshire Golden Harvey for the Pomona of the Woolhope Club.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate XVI · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

The Blenheim Orange, found as a seedling against the park wall at Woodstock, painted from the fruit with its blossom for the Herefordshire Pomona, the grandest of English fruit books.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate VII · 1877. From £10, A4 to A2.

The Foxwhelp, the oldest and most famous of the Herefordshire cider apples, the first plate of the Pomona, painted from the fruit with its blossom by Alice Ellis.

The Herefordshire Pomona, plate I · 1876. From £10, A4 to A2.

The wild ancestor of every florist's cyclamen, painted by Ferdinand Bauer from the plants of the Greek islands and published in Flora Graeca as Cyclamen latifolium.

Flora Graeca, plate 185 · 1813. From £10, A4 to A2.

The bearded iris of the old gardens, the fleur-de-lis of heralds and the orris of perfumers, drawn by Ferdinand Bauer from plants growing on the walls of Greece for Flora Graeca.

Flora Graeca, plate 40 · 1806. From £10, A4 to A2.

The laurel of Apollo and of the kitchen, the tree that crowned Greek victors and still flavours every stock pot, drawn from the wild trees of Greece for Flora Graeca.

Flora Graeca, plate 365 · 1823. From £10, A4 to A2.

The myrtle of Aphrodite and of every royal wedding bouquet since 1858, drawn from the wild shrubs of Greece by Ferdinand Bauer for Flora Graeca.

Flora Graeca, plate 475 · 1825. From £10, A4 to A2.

The caper bush of the Mediterranean cliffs, its buds pickled for the table since the Bronze Age, drawn by Ferdinand Bauer with the extravagant white flower that opens for a single morning.

Flora Graeca, plate 486 · 1825. From £10, A4 to A2.

The olive of the Greek hills, drawn by Ferdinand Bauer for the third plate of Flora Graeca, the most expensive botanical book ever published.

Flora Graeca, plate 3 · 1806. From £10, A4 to A2.

Single dahlias in scarlet, yellow and white, the Mexican mountain flower the Aztecs grew for its tubers, returned to fashion in the 1880s and drawn for Favourite Flowers.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse, plate 141 · 1896. From £10, A4 to A2.

The Ghent gladiolus, the hybrid that turned a Cape wild flower into the sword lily of the Victorian border, drawn for Favourite Flowers at two-thirds natural size.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse, plate 258 · 1897. From £10, A4 to A2.

Zinnias in scarlet, rose, yellow and white, the Mexican annual the Aztecs thought ugly and the Victorians bred into the brightest flower of the summer border, drawn for Favourite Flowers.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse, plate 138 · 1896. From £10, A4 to A2.

The clove-scented carnation, flower of Zeus and of the Tudor wine cup, in the red, yellow and striped border forms of the 1890s, drawn at natural size for Favourite Flowers.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse · 1896. From £10, A4 to A2.

The show pansies of the 1890s, round, flat and blotched like faces, bred within living memory from the little wild heartsease, drawn at natural size for Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse · 1896. From £10, A4 to A2.

The sweet pea of the cottage garden, a Sicilian wild flower that a monk posted to an Enfield schoolmaster in 1699, drawn for Edward Step's Favourite Flowers at the height of its Victorian fashion.

Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse, plate 71 · 1896. From £10, A4 to A2.

The pompon de Bourgogne, a cabbage rose shrunk to a foot high with flowers like rosettes of ribbon, painted by Redouté for the last volume of Les Roses.

Les Roses · 1824. From £10, A4 to A2.

A moss rose with the open, anemone-like flower that showed off its mossy buds, raised at La Flèche in Anjou and painted by Redouté for the last volume of Les Roses.

Les Roses · 1824. From £10, A4 to A2.

The flesh-pink double form of the many-flowered rose of eastern Asia, sent from Canton in 1804, painted by Redouté in a spray of a dozen small roses for Les Roses.

Les Roses · 1821. From £10, A4 to A2.

The white rose, the oldest of the garden roses after the gallica, in a form whose buds are wrapped in leafy sepals, painted by Redouté for the last volume of Les Roses.

Les Roses · 1824. From £10, A4 to A2.

The cabbage rose of the Dutch flower painters, a hundred petals packed into a globe, in a form with scalloped leaflets that Redouté painted for Les Roses.

Les Roses · 1821. From £10, A4 to A2.

A small deep-crimson gallica rose with petals like velvet, from the Van Eeden nursery at Haarlem, painted by Redouté for Les Roses and printed in colour from a stipple-engraved plate.

Les Roses · 1821. From £10, A4 to A2.

The scarlet poppy of the cornfield, the weed that followed the plough from the Near East to every field in Britain, drawn from life by F. E. Hulme for Familiar Wild Flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

The woodbine of the hedgerow, scented at dusk for the moths that pollinate it, drawn by F. E. Hulme for the second series of Familiar Wild Flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1879. From £10, A4 to A2.

The harebell, the bluebell of Scotland, nodding on wiry stems over dry turf from July to September, drawn by Hulme for Familiar Wild Flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

The dog rose of the June hedgerow, Britain's commonest wild rose and the rootstock of a thousand garden roses, from Hulme's Familiar Wild Flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

The May tree: the hawthorn in blossom, the plant of two hundred thousand miles of English hedges, drawn with its flowers and its haws for Familiar Wild Flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.

The primrose of the hedge bank, 'first rose' of the English spring, as F. E. Hulme drew it from life for the book that taught Victorian walkers the names of their wild flowers.

Familiar Wild Flowers · 1878. From £10, A4 to A2.