Botanical illustration without the drawing

A page from the Observer's book

Out on a cycle ride the other day the kids and I were trying to identify some of the flowers springing up in the hedgerows using "The Observer's Book of British Wild Flowers". It was my mother-in-law's book and has an inscription dated 1948 in it. It is full of small but beautiful illustrations.

I love this kind of botanical illustration and was reminded of my attempts to recreate "The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady" (Edith Holden) back when I was about twelve.

My attempts failed at the first page when I realised that neither my artistic talents nor my handwriting were going to produce anything resembling the charm of said book.

Project shelved.


Thirty odd years later and I was wondering whether technology could help the less able artists among us (including my own children) produce a nature diary incorporating a bit of the charm of Edith Holden's diary. Here is one of our efforts of a forget-me-not from the garden.

Our modern botanical print

And here is how it was done. You will need:
- Sugar Paper (yellowish to look like parchment)
- A source of small flowers
- Paper glue
- Plastic tweezers (optional)
- Scanner, computer and image editing software

1. Pick a flower as low down as possible so as to include the leaves.
2. Spread paper glue thinly onto an area of the sugar paper roughly the size of the flower to be stuck down.
3. Carefully stick the flower and leaves onto the glue. A pair of plastic tweezers is useful here. Wait for glue to dry.
4. Place picture in scanner. Scan and import into image editing software (we used GIMP which is free).
5. Crop and add a caption using a font that looks like old fashioned script.
6. Print and stick into your nature diary / scrapbook.

I'm really pleased with the results and it's a good alternative to flower pressing.

A page from Edith Holden's diary

Something to aim for? Not sure how we are going to get the butterflies under the scanner though!

REMEMBER If you are picking flowers in the wild, only pick flowers of commoner species. It is the flowers that produce seeds and without seeds there can be no future generation of flowers. Widespread picking of flowers seriously threatens seed production. Many wild plants are protected species because of their rarity. It is an offence to pick any of these.