Floral Collection: Coral Drops, Prairie Gentian, Monkey Orchid, Bellflower, 1875

Four botanical plates from Louis Van Houtte's Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe, 1875, original color lithographs of Latin American flowering plants. Each plate is lettered with its plant name: Bessera miniata, Lisianthus princeps, Masdevallia elephanticeps and Ceratostema grandiflorum.

The first plate shows Bessera, the coral drops of Mexico, a slender arching stem bearing a loose umbel of drooping red and white blooms, with the small bulb drawn at the base. The second shows Lisianthus princeps, a tubular flower shading from rose-pink to yellow with a tuft of green leaves, set beside small pencil studies of its parts. The third is the orchid Masdevallia elephanticeps, whose long yellow and purple-brown sepals curl upward and outward from tall stems. The fourth is Ceratostema grandiflorum, a shrubby twig hung with orange-red tubular flowers and small oval leaves. Each colored plant is accompanied by fine outline dissections of the flower in the margin, as in a working botanical record.

Van Houtte issued the Flore des Serres from his nursery at Ghent, and its plates introduced European growers to newly imported exotics from the tropics, here drawn from Mexico and the Andes.