BOOK REVIEWS

A CORNUCOPIA OF FRUIT & VEGETABLES

by Caroline Ball

Bodleian Library, £15 ISBN 978-1851245666

Delve into the fascinating, pictorial world of 18th-century edible produce with this colourful compendium of botanical artwork.

Reviewer Katy Merrington is cultural gardener at The Hepworth Wakefield.

Blushing peaches, sturdy turnips, hairy carrots and pink-veined cabbages all grace the pages of this trimly digestible picture book. Selected fruit and vegetable portraits have been chosen from the weighty volumes of the Phytanthoza Iconographia. This historic A to Z of plant life was published in four volumes between 1734 and 1745 by ambitious apothecary Johann Wilhelm Weinmann, who sought to portray and describe thousands of plants in a vastly encyclopaedic work.

Weinmann employed a succession of talented artists, writers and printmakers to collaborate on the project and the mezzotints and hand-coloured etchings reproduced here have a soft and faithful clarity that belie their age. Each fruit and vegetable specimen sits succinctly on its own white page, an archetype, an object separated from the conditions in which it grows, yet ripe and swollen with