Flora Indica

Exhibitions, Books & Illustrations

I was recently alerted to a current well received exhibition at Kew Gardens: Flora Indica: Recovering the lost histories of Indian botanical art,

“One of the most significant collections of botanical art at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, was made in colonial India between 1790 and 1850. Over 7,500 drawings documenting the flora of South Asia were commissioned by British East India Company employees, but created entirely by Indian artists. These works of hybrid art travelled to Kew by various routes - some from private collections, many from the Company’s India Museum in 1879.”

There’s also a new book Flora Indica Recovering Lost Stories from Kew’s Indian Drawings: by Dr Henry Noltie, Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Natural History Museum, London, that accompanies it.

Flora Indica presents a representative selection from the previously fractured, uncatalogued, and largely inaccessible collection of over 7,000 Indian illustrations in Kew’s archives, through which readers are invited to discover the important lost histories of Indian botanical art from the age of empire. With a foreword by art historian William Dalrymple.

I have coincidentally also been collecting, for my own research similarly titled books and collections of illustrations under the catregory of Flora Indica that I have organised below. It includes links to image databases and digital books online including downloadable pdf’s

Some of that research was for an Indian Temple Garden project

Temple Garden