Alongside these engraved images of well-known and well-documented medicinal plants, in this volume we see an abundance of marginal notes in both French and Latin, and apparently in multiple hands. These “field-note” annotations appear across much of the present volume and extend even to variations on the preliminary printed alphabetical index of plant names. In the best ancient tradition of Theophrastus and Dioscorides, the printed pages and manuscript notes throughout this volume focus on the medicinal properties of plants as practical materia medica suited to multiple nutritional and pharmacological applications. On top of all of the rich content added through verbal annotations, the reader of this copy also finds, across several of its black-and-white woodcuts, partially hand-colored flower petals in hues of red and blue, and greens upon some leaves. Most remarkable of all in this hard-working copy of Fuchs is the subtly preserved shadow of an actual organic sample that had formerly been pressed between two pages. Its elements closely mirror the facing illustration of a water dropwort (oenanthe)—a plant that grows in wet, marshy environments.

Leonhart Fuchs, one of the “fathers” of botany—along with his German contemporaries Hieronymus Bock and Otto Brunfels—expanded and updated classical traditions of natural history, such as those of Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, with textual and visual catalogues of hundreds of known plants native to Europe. The significance of his contributions to botanical knowledge was perhaps best memorialized by a later French botanist, Charles Plumier, whose work took him to several expeditions in the West Indies in search of exotic plant species. In his book Nova plantarum Americanum (1703), Plumier honored Fuchs by naming a spectacularly colored plant after him, the bright purple-red-petaled “Fuchsia triphylla”—whose name is the source of the color term “fuschia” that is used up to the present day.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens