Opening the herbarium

Botanica started from old botanical plates — the kind bound into 19th-century books, where a single camellia gets an entire page and a Latin caption in careful italics. So that is what this shop makes: engraved-style plates, pressed-specimen studies, mushroom plates with a slightly gothic streak, and oil-painted florals borrowed from the Dutch Golden Age. Scientific in structure, romantic in feeling. They are designed to be grouped. Three plates in matching frames reads like a page torn from a herbarium; one large oil floral over a bed does the opposite job just as well. Beyond prints there are a few things to wear and use, with the same illustrations, for people who would rather carry a botanical study than hang it. Everything is printed to order. Three specimens below to start the collection.