Botanical Art Gallery
Choose from 1,797 images in our Botanical Art collection.
Medicinal Plants
Botanical Art
> Fungi
> Palms
> Cacti and Succulents
> Bulbs
> Orchids
> The Honzo Zufu Collection
> Trees
> William Roxburgh
> Edible plants
> Curtis's Botanical Magazine
> Marianne North
> Landscapes
> More Botanical Illustrations
History
The Gardens
Kew at Work
Architecture
Endangered plants
Natural Environment
Plants and Fungi
Trees and Shrubs
Wildlife
Images Dated

713. View of Lake Wakatipe, New Zealand
New Zealand Flax (Phormniumn tenax, Forst.) in the foreground. This is the most useful plant in the islands. Half-a-pint of honey juice can be obtained from the flowers of a single plant ; a gum is exuded where the leaves are broken away from the ste
© RBG KEW
713, Art, Lake Wakatipe, Landscape, Marianne North, New Zealand, Painting, Phormium Tenax, Victorian

Adansonia digitata, Willd. (Baobab or Upside-down tree)
Watercolour on paper, no date (late 18th early 19th century). Hand painted copy of an illustration commissioned by William Roxburgh (1751-1815). In his Flora indica Roxburgh describes this plant as a tree which is very scarce in India, and probably not a native of Asia'. Roxburgh tells that in the Botanic Garden of Calcutta, where this tree blossoms in May and June, and ripens its seed in the cool season, there is a 25 years old plant of Adansonia digitata, with an irregular, short and sub-conical trunk, which is 18 feet in circumference. In a letter sent to Roxburgh the 2nd of July 1802, from Mantolle, in Sri Lanka, General Hay Macdowell notes: In my walk last night on the ruins of this once rich and extensive city, called by the natives Mande or Maddoo-ooltum, I chanced to observe a tree whose prodigious magnitude induced me to measure it...fifty feet in circumference, above six feet from the ground, the natives call it Peerig, and from what I have been able to collect, it is not indigenous here
© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew