Florilegium

Rich owners of private gardens commissioned large-format florilegiums to immortalize their personal taste and power of acquisition, and the drawn pages burned with the urgency and excitement of explaining every plant’s form, color, and beauty.

Two centuries of German poetry lived in this old German flower garden, from the crude florilegiums of Baroque lyric to Eichendorff, who in its after-life, while looking back on so much by-gone glory, became its truest expression, as formulated by a new spirit, since poetry is the first and final need of the human soul, for which reality does not suffice.

There was a considerable overlap between florilegiums, with their wealth of botanical illustration and exotic collections, and embroiderers’ source books. Crispin van de Passe’s A Garden of Flowers or Hortus Floridus (1614) contained engravings and descriptions of all types of garden flowers, and proved as invaluable to the embroiderer as to the gardener.