The new ‘Flora Batava’, about the historical biodiversity of the Netherlands, is packed with information and beauty.
The term tour de force seems specially designed for this. To the Flora Batava or inventory of Dutch wild plants has been worked for 134 years. From 1800 to 1934. Biodiversity in 28 volumes. 2,240 images of 2,630 plants, mainly flowers, but also, for example, fungi and seaweeds that you find in the Netherlands.
At the time, the beautiful color prints were supplemented with some 5,000 pages of accompanying text that is still quite readable today. Several generations of amateur botanists, academics and artists participated in collecting, describing and depicting.
The result is astonishing, especially now – ninety years after the end of the original series – the material is available for the first time in one volume, a hefty book of almost a thousand pages or four kilograms. On each plate, the shapes and parts of a plant are worked out down to the finest detail.
For example, the dandelion or Leontodon taraxacum ‘dissected’: flower, leaf, root, even ‘the fluff’ – you could blow them off the page. In the accompanying text it is reported, among other things, that the leaves of this ‘piss in the bed’ are edible in the spring ‘either raw as a salad, or cooked as a stew’.
Mikado
The compilers of the collection, Esther van Gelder and Norbert Peeters, asked fellow plant connoisseurs for a plate from the Flora Batava adopt and write about it. That turns out to be a success. For example, I now know that ‘the dandelion’ actually does not exist. About sixty species can be found in an average meadow.
You can instead of the Flora Batava of course download an app on your phone that recognizes plants or dry plants in the old-fashioned romantic way in the books you read, but then you miss the magic of the precise drawing that page after page of the Flora Batava surprised.
Ultimately, this book, made in collaboration with the Dutch National Library, is best enjoyed simply by looking at the drawings – you don’t have to be a botanist to love this. Be sure to study the hundred large ones in original format, because they surpass the reduced images in every way.
The beauty often lies in the first impression: for example, the pill-bearing reed grass or pilsedge resembles an illustration from a contemporary children’s picture book, or a plan for a mikado artwork à la Arne Quinze.
Esther van Gelder & Norbert Peeters (ed.), Flora Batava 1800-1934. The wild plants of the Netherlands Lannoo/KB, 912 pp., price: 79 euros (after 31 August 99 euros)