Everlasting Flowers between the Pages

A florilegium is a picture book filled with many species and varieties of flowers that were widely desired for seventeenth-century European gardens. While many aspects of florilegia seem simple and unimportant from our modern perspective, they grow in complexity and significance when placed into their historical contexts. This colourfully illustrated volume offers new insights into how florilegia functioned as material objects that highlighted and showcased many forms of knowledge, thereby revealing the expertise which the gardeners, compilers, and image-makers must have possessed in order to cultivate the once-living specimens and immortalise the flowers on paper and parchment.