Picturesque travel through Germany, 19th C

Hamburg, from Voyage pittoresque en Allemagne (Picturesque travel through Germany)

Xavier Marmier (22 June 1808 - 12 October 1892) was a French author born in Pontarlier, city famous for the production of absinthe until its prohibition in 1915. Xavier had a great passion for traveling, and combined this passion with literature. After journeying around Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, he was attached in 1835 to the Arctic expedition of the Recherche; and after a couple of years at Rennes as professor of foreign literature, he visited (1842) Russia, (1845) Syria, (1846) Algeria, (1848–1849) North America and South America. 

In 1870 he was elected to the Academy (Seat #31), and he was for many years prominently identified with the Sainte-Geneviève library. He did much to encourage the study of Scandinavian literature in France, publishing translations of Holberg, Oehlenschlager and others. He died in Paris in 1892.

Lübeck, from Voyage pittoresque en Allemagne (Picturesque travel through Germany)

Wrocław, the city hall.

St. Lorenz church, Nuremberg.

Dresden.

Flowers of the Greenhouses and Gardens of Europe, 19th C

Golden Esperen plum.
From Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l’Europe (Flowers of the Greenhouses and Gardens of Europe) vol. 4, by Charles Lemaire, Michael Scheidweiler, and Louis van Houtte, Ghent, 1848.

Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe ('Flowers of the Greenhouses and Gardens of Europe') was one of the finest horticulture journals produced in Europe during the 19th century, spanning 23 volumes and over 2000 coloured plates with French, German and English text. Founded by Louis van Houtte and edited together with Charles Antoine Lemaire and Michael Joseph François Scheidweiler, it was a showcase for lavish hand-finished engravings and lithographs depicting and describing botanical curiosities and treasures from around the world.

The work is remarkable for the level of colour-printing craftmanship displayed by the Belgian lithographers Severeyns, Stroobant, and De Pannemaker. Louis-Constantin Stroobant (1814-1872), printed many of the illustrations for the first 10 volumes. Most of the plants depicted in Flore des Serres were available for sale in van Houtte's nursery, so that in a sense the journal doubled as a catalogue.

The editors were experienced botanical engravers and horticulturists, combining their knowledge and skills to create a showpiece of novel exotics and familiar cultivated plants. Lemaire came from being an engraver for Redoute's great works Les Liliaces and Les Roses. van Houtte, owner of the most successful nursery on the Continent at that time, sent his own plant explorers to find unknown orchids and other exotics, and to return them to Ghent for cultivation at his nursery, and later publication in Flore des Serres.

Paphiopedilum lowii (syn. cypripedium lowii)

Primula auricula nigra

American Starthistle (Centaurea americana)

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea, syn. Echinacea intermedia)