The Flora Danica encyclopedia
This early volume of the Flora Danica encyclopedia was published in 1766. Its author is the German botanist Georg Christian Oeder, head of the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. He had the idea for the project and oversaw the effort to collect and document plants throughout the Danish realm.
Flora Danica is the result of a nation-wide project to collect and depict wild plants – a huge undertaking that lasted for 122 years.
Production and publication
The collection of plants for the Flora Danica encyclopedia was carried out by scientists and illustrators who found, identified and depicted thousands of wild plants throughout the Danish realm. The pictures were carried out as copper engravings and printed. The encyclopedia was released in separate issues containing 40 plates each, which were then assembled into volumes of 3 or 4 issues each – like this one.
The plates in this first volume have not been coloured after printing, probably because pigments were so expensive.
Expertise and distribution
Oeder commissioned copperplate engravers from Nuremberg, Germany, who had expertise in creating copperplate engravings of topics from natural history. In Nuremberg, he also found women artisans with expertise in hand-colouring drawings of plants.
To ensure wide distribution of the publication, complementary copies were given to bishops who were asked to make the books available and collect information about the plants among the farmers in their area. However, the farmers never provided much information, and the project – which continued for 122 years – was never completed.