Printing with Herbs

While painting by a river in the New Jersey Pine Barrens about 15 years ago, I picked a small leaf from under the water. Iron in the water had given it a reddish brown coating. I placed the leaf on the damp paper of the watercolor I was working on and pressed firmly with the heel of my hand. The leaf left a faint, irregular impression. I brushed the leaf with a bit of thick watercolor paint and pressed it again to the painting. The result was lovely!

I included impressions of leaves and flowers in my “river paintings” for more than a year before discovering Ida Geary’s book Plant Prints and Collages (Viking Press, 1978) on a library shelf. I was amazed: what I had been doing was in fact a long-practiced art with many variations and possibilities. For centuries, people had been making visual impressions from inked or painted plants, shells, feathers, tree bark, ­spider webs—even spiders, larger animals, and human beings.

Nature printing can be a complex art form or as simple as a kindergarten potato print. My appreciation of nature printing grew as I experimented and learned more about the subject.

Early uses of nature printing

When or where nature printing originated is not known, but it has ­occupied an elusive position at the ­intersection of precision and beauty, between scientific function and artistic expression. The earliest description of nature printing is found in Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus (c. 1500), along with an impression of a sage leaf. Early nature printers held botanical specimens over a candle or oil lamp until they were covered with smoke (lampblack) and then pressed or rubbed them ­between sheets of paper.

These nature prints, though crude, were clearly representative of the plants and could be produced by anyone. Only the work of skilled botanical illustrators was superior in showing the natural forms. But botanical illustrations in many early herbals, though beautiful, were often inaccurate, and copying and recopying by a succession of illustrators over the course of centuries introduced further inaccuracies. Students of herbal medicine ­studied plants solely from the pictures in herbals until well into the sixteenth century. In 1545, however, a garden was planted at the medical school of the University of Padua, Italy, so that students could study living plants. ­Although the new science of botany and medicine were taught as separate disciplines, the idea of physick gardens caught on, and these gardens were planted in universities all over Europe.

The invention of the printing press gave rise to the establishment of paper mills as it became clear that books could be printed on paper more easily and quickly than on vellum (prepared animal skins). After some of the paper was used to print impressions of plants, and printer’s ink was found to produce more accurate impressions than lampblack, nature printing became more widely appreciated for its scientific usefulness. As Johann Beckmann stated in A History of Inventions (1786), “These impressions . . . preserve so well what botanists call the appearance, habitus, of the plant, that they afford no small assistance towards acquiring a knowledge of many vegetable productions.” Nature prints, like pressed plant specimens, could be labeled with pertinent information and filed away for future reference.