A complete reproduction and restoration of Elizabeth Twining’s celebrated catalog of botanical illustrations from 1868, Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants enhanced with interactive illustrations, descriptions, and posters featuring the illustrations.
Each of the 160 illustrations was restored from the original scans to be as colorful as the plants they depict, which involved carefully adjusting the colors and cleaning up spotting and other other markings on the scans to produce clean images without altering the underlying original illustrations.
After restoration, every plant that was referenced in the original illustrations’ legends was carefully outlined to create hotspots that correspond with the accompanying descriptions. This process alone took one to four hours per image and the entire project took four months to complete.
Throughout Twining’s two volumes, most descriptions included mentions of how some plants had affinities or connections with others in other tribes. An interactive diagram illustrates all those likenesses connected in one network.
Posters were designed as a tribute to Elizabeth Twining’s dedicated efforts to illustrate the natural orders of plants in ways that invite exploration.
