Enjoy the beautiful silliness of Edward Lear's "Nonsense Botany". These illustrations were created from 1871-1877 in a series of books about surreal, made-up plants.
Some of the plants have fish sprouting from them, while others have mischievous cartoon faces. I love the playful spirit of these illustrations and the overall concept for the book. Any one of these surreal plants would make a bad-ass tattoo!
From Public Domain Review:
"With his Nonsense Botany series the Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear turned his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy. A little over a century earlier the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus had laid the foundations for the binomial nomenclature system, in which a species is given a two-part name: the first part identifying the species' genus, the second part identifying the species within the genus. The system, with its usage of Latin grammatical forms, proves fertile ground for Lear's imagination."
