Wednesday 3 December 2025

Book Presentation Everlasting Flowers between the Pages

culture and art science and technology
Location Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag
Start/end 2–5 p.m.
17th-century illustration of an anemone by Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt, National Museum Collection.

On Tuesday 3 December 2025, Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, postdoctoral researcher at the Huygens Institute, will present her book Everlasting Flowers between the Pages at the Royal Library (KB) in The Hague.

Flower Illustrations from the 17th Century

The book is part of the Emergence of Natural History series and deals with seventeenth-century florilegia: lavishly illustrated flower books with hand-drawn or printed images of a wide variety of flowers. Many of these plants came from America’s and Asia and were highly sought after in Europe for cultivation and study in gardens, but native flora was also included.

By approaching florilegia as material objects, Chen offers new insights into how these books reflected different forms of plant knowledge:

– how gardeners cultivated the living specimens,
– how compilers and image makers used their expertise to capture the flowers on paper or parchment.

Experiments with Plant Pigments

The result is a colourfully illustrated work that reveals the layered knowledge and production processes behind florilegia. In addition, Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen herself experiments with making natural pigments from flowers and plants, sometimes using specimens she had sourced herself. A remarkable cross-pollination of botany, art and book history. Chapters of the book can be downloaded free of charge from the Brill Publishers website.

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen experiments with plant pigments herself. Image from Everlasting Flowers between the Pages, Appendix 1, Making Colours Series.

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen experiments with pigments. Image from Everlasting Flowers between the Pages, Appendix 1, Making Colours Series.