How do you print a leaf?

This simple print of a sage leaf is one of the earliest surviving nature prints on paper. It dates from around 1508 and is by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Alongside, Da Vinci provides a how-to guide to nature printing, explaining how to paint and print the leaf onto the page.

In fact, people have been making nature prints for hundreds of years – from hand prints in cave paintings to fern leaves printed onto early textiles. However, Da Vinci’s leaf print reflected a growing interest in nature printing as a valid form of botanical illustration.

_{Image: Nature print of a sage leaf in Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus , about 1508. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC-PD-mark).}

From the 1500s, herbalists in Italy and Germany were amongst the first to experiment with printing directly from plants. Like Da Vinci, they used the relatively basic technique of pressing and inking plants to create an impression on the page. Another popular method was to hold a dried plant specimen over a candle and to use soot to create the print.

They found that they could create prints that were in some ways more true-to-life and certainly more unique than the schematic woodcuts of medicinal plants more usually found in Herbals of the time.

Virtual plants?

Almost 250 years after Da Vinci printed his sage leaf, the German theologian and educator, Johann Julius Hecker (1707–1768) used a similar direct pressing, inking and printing technique to capture a whole sage plant.

Like all nature prints, Hecker’s sage is a ‘virtual plant’, not the real thing like the preserved herbarium specimen shown on the far right. The sage is one of a long series of printed plant specimens, which Hecker published in 3 volumes between 1757–58.

The varying quality of Hecker's individual prints reveals one of the main disadvantages of direct nature printing: the deterioration of the plant specimen as it is repeatedly inked and pressed to the page. They also of course failed to capture the colour of the original plant specimen.

New colours

In 18th century Germany, a new figure arrived on the nature printing scene.

The physician and botanist, Johann Hieronymous Kniphof (1704–1763) published a trail-blazing collection of colour nature prints in the same year as Hecker’s black and white prints in 1757.

Kniphof, however, transformed the technique. As a botanist himself, he saw the value of nature printing for the growing science of botany and the recording and identification of plants. This drove his experimentation with different colourful inks and pressing methods to create nature prints.

His four-volume Botanica in originali (subtitled the Living Herbaria), brings together an incredible 1200 hand-coloured plates of a huge variety of plant specimens.

Kniphof was primarily motivated by a scientific desire to replicate accurate botanical specimens. However, his commitment to nature printing was also a philosophical one. Nature printing allowed a particular absence of human interpretation. It was not simply an art form but a technique driven by a desire to replicate nature accurately without the altering hand of an artist. For some, it was almost divine – ‘engraven by the Best Engraver in the Universe’.

Of course, Kniphof’s nature prints were still dependent on the intervention of the individual artists who applied colour to each print. Not only was their quality dependent on the skill of the particular colourist, it was limited by the ink colours available at the time. There seems to have been particular difficulties in capturing light colours, for example.

_{Images: Nature prints of a sweet pea (left) and poppy (right), both from Johann Kniphof's Botanica in orginali (Halle, 1757). Credit: RHS Lindley Collections.}

Like many examples of nature printing, Kniphof’s printing process was better suited to some plants than others – as can be seen in these rather odd looking prints of large petalled flowers. The tulip on the left is by Kniphof while the Iris is by Christian Ludwig (1709–1773), another figure experimenting with colour nature prints at the time.

Kniphof’s process was also extremely time-consuming and expensive, with only 14 editions of his Botanica in originali ever being produced.

Today, the exact mechanics of his printing technique remain something of a mystery.

Copying nature?

News of Auer’s innovations had spread fast in the printing trade and in 1852, a young Englishman arrived at the Vienna printing house eager to learn more.

Henry Bradbury was the son of William Bradbury of Bradbury and Evans, the major London publishing house which counted Dickens amongst its clients. Despite being made very welcome during his time shadowing Auer, on his return to England, Bradbury patented what he called his variant of nature printing: Autotypography.

It is hard to say how this differed from Auer’s technique and Auer certainly felt there was very little difference indeed.

_{Image: Print maker, Pia Östlund recreating Alois Auer's nature printing technique, lifting a nature print of an oak leaf from the plate. Credit: Image courtesy of Pia Östlund and Andrew Montgomery.}

Despite a high-profile copyright dispute with Auer, Bradbury was not deterred. He went on to make a name for himself with his controversial nature prints in a successful collaboration with popular botanist, Thomas Moore.

Capitalising on the contemporary craze for fern collecting – or 'fern fever' – Bradbury and Evans published a series of impressive volumes on British ferns authored by Moore and illustrated by Bradbury’s nature prints. Following an enormous folio volume, they shrewdly produced a series of much smaller octavo volumes that were designed to be portable for the amateur botanist. These accompanied a series on British seaweed by W.G. Johnstone and A. Croall, complete with slightly less successful nature prints of seaweed by Bradbury.

 Nature printing continued to divide opinion amongst 19th-century botanists.

There was criticism that the printing process itself distorted the original botanical specimen as fleshy stems were crushed between the steel and lead printing plates. Equally, the x-ray-like quality of nature prints may have been beautiful, but some felt that this translucent colouring was artificial.

In the 1860s, the budget of the Vienna Printing House was severely cut and Alois Auer's nature printing experiments were wound up. Tragically, at the beginning of the same decade, Bradbury committed suicide. After this, the ambition to find a workable way of mass-producing nature prints seemed to dwindle and it is difficult to find many successful examples after Bradbury and Auer.

Nature printing has continued to appear in different forms. Many of the beautifully blue Victorian cyanotypes, which played such an important role in the development of photography are essentially nature prints. In recent decades, contemporary artists and printmakers have also begun to experiment with the art of nature printing – seeking to rediscover the mysteries of this always fascinating process.

Scroll down to explore our gallery of fern portraits from the RHS Lindley Collections – can you tell the difference between nature printing and alternative ways of picturing Nature?