ABOVE: © 2019 STEFENAKI ET AL.
Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers. This sentence, inscribed in Latin in the 16th-century En Tibi herbarium, invites readers to enjoy a book of roughly 500 dried plants that is one of the oldest surviving botanical collections in the world. Bound in Italy during the Renaissance, the book contains some of the earliest herbarium records of oregano, thyme, and hot pepper, and has contributed to historians’ understanding of the origins of botany even as the identity of its maker remained a mystery for centuries.
“It’s like having a painting by Leonardo da Vinci and not knowing that it’s he who made it,” Anastasia Stefanaki, a botanist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, tells The Scientist. Hundreds of years ago, Dutch scholar and manuscript collector Isaac Vossius got hold of the En Tibi, and a year after his death ...
