Moon Orchid
by Paxton, Sir Joseph (1803 - 1865)

Paxton’s Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants was published for 16 years, starting in 1834. Unlike a modern-day magazine, each oversized hardcover volume was enclosed in striking marbled boards, elegantly bound in leather and embossed with gold. A single volume could contain as many as 50 meticulously detailed full-page hand-coloured prints by various naturalists, each one a work of art in itself. The Phalaenopsis amabilis, or Moon Orchid, carefully rendered here, is thought to have been first discovered in Indonesia by the Dutch botanist Carl Ludwig Blume, who was associated with Java’s botanical garden at Bogor.

This image can be found in Paxton’s Magazine of Botany in UBC’s Woodward Library (QK1 .P18 V. 7)

© UBC Library 

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