Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections holds a large
number of illustrated botanical books printed before 1900,
ranging from Renaissance medicinal guides and Enlightenment
taxonomic treatises to the garden books and field guides popular
among hobbyists and amateur botanists of the nineteenth century.
The illustrations in these books cover the full spectrum of
printing techniques, from descriptive woodcuts intended to aid
in plant identification to colorful lithographs of artfully
arranged flowers. The earliest post-classical botanical
illustrations are found in herbals, which identify plants and
their practical, usually medicinal, uses. Authors of early
herbals follow the authority of classical writers in both text
and illustration, and most illustrators worked not from life but
from drawings in other herbals. The Hortus Sanitatis (ca. 1500)
was one of the earliest printed herbals in Europe and provided
images for many subsequent herbals. The unreliable, derivative
illustrations were usually of little