# flowers floralfriday floral rarebooks oldbooks books bookstagram illustrations melbweather library engraving red hot holly sciart illustration christmas christmasday botanicalart botanicals deckthehalls flower friday poinsettia highlights website botany classic swans birds 12daysofchristmas xmas ornithology geese librarychristmascountdown onthisday otd monkeys monkeyday worldmonkeyday monkey doves 12daysofbooks feathursday lithograph magpie gould bird partridge pear reindeer speccoll twitterstorians botanicalillustration durham winter phd fellowships postdoctoral plant humanities postdoc digitalhumanities archives historyofscience garden rarebookrequests standrewsday scottish naturalist fish fishes monochrome opossum sheep

It’s a bloody scorcher in Melbourne today 😅

Here’s a couple of that look as hot as I feel rn from Curtis’ ‘Botanical magazine’ via

1 10
2019-01-04

Deck the halls with boughs of Ilex aquifolium

FA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

Happy holidays!

via

0 9
2018-12-25

is nearly here, so I’ve picked an appropriate for

The (Euphorbia pulcherrima) in its beautiful red and green is believed to have been used as a Christmas decoration as early as the 17th C

5 15
2018-12-21

We've updated the section of our One of the items that were added is one of the greatest flower books published in the 18th-century .
https://t.co/Mho2aiw9SN

1 3
2018-12-21

On the seventh day of my true love gave to me...
Seven a-swimming

from John Gould's '#Birds of Great Britain' via - https://t.co/jNzm0p7t2f

0 7
2018-12-19

On the sixth day of my true love gave to me...
Six a-laying

Geese from a Larousse encyclopedia (1922), egg from Seebohm ‘A history of British birds’ (1883-95), collage by Kathy Heyward

0 5
2018-12-18

Day 17
The familiar tradition of decking the halls with boughs of holly for winter festivals pre-dates Christmas. Today is the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when Romans would decorate their houses with holly & exchange gifts.

6 6
2018-12-17

I think my favourite thing about these weirdo is that they look like they've all been caught doing something...

From 'Die saugthiere in abbildungen nach der natur' by Schreber (1774-1846)

5 24
2018-12-14

On the second day of my true love gave to me...
Two turtle

from Audubon's 'Birds of America' (1827–1838)

0 7
2018-12-14

is upon us again - this of a Sri Lankan Blue (Urocissa ornata) is from John ‘Birds of Asia’ (1850-1883)

Hard to believe that this colourful is in the same family as crows and ravens!

1 9
2018-12-13

On the first day of my true love gave to me...
A in a tree

from Gould 'Birds of Europe' and 'Lessons from the vegetable world'; collage by Kathy Heyward

1 8
2018-12-13

Day 11
A & Sami family, from a 1674 English translation of 'The history of Lapland', by Swedish humanist Johannes Schefferus. Did you know the Sami are the northernmost indigenous people of Europe?

1 6
2018-12-11

Day 10
Will you be eating figgy pudding this Christmas? A tradition dating back to C16th, when fig trees became commonplace in English gardens. This hand-coloured by Johann Muller (or John Miller) dates from 1777.

2 5
2018-12-10

Day 6
A little robin from Eleazer Albin's 'A Natural History of (1738-40). With over 300 hand-coloured engravings by Albin & his daughter Elizabeth, this was the first British work of to feature hand-coloured plates.

2 6
2018-12-06

Day 4
It was a frosty morning in this morning, so here's a lovely arctic fox from John Ross's 'Narrative of the 2nd Voyage in Search of the Northwest Passage', 1835.

1 4
2018-12-04

A rather poorly copy of The English Gentlewoman (1631) requested today, featuring an upside down frontispiece and manuscript annotations from former owners. (Broughton.57)

6 54
2018-11-30

It’s so shout out to my favourite my boy Patrick Russell

These two striking are from ‘Descriptions and figures of two hundred (1803)

https://t.co/gCSLiER4BN

2 17
2018-11-30

Another spot the difference...

On the left an from Seba's 'Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio' (1734-65)

On the right an opossum from Schreber's 'Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes représentés d´après nature' (1780)

1 3
2018-11-28

I am legit about six months off the pace here, but...

LOOK AT THIS ABSOLUTE UNIT 🐑

Old Lincoln breed from ‘The breeds of the domestic animals of the British Islands’ by David Low (1842) from ’s collection

0 9
2018-11-26