The Auricula and Its Admirers: Nederlandsch Bloemwerk 1794 & the Gottorfer Codex
There is a flower that has been obsessively collected, painted, and catalogued for four hundred years, and most people have never heard of it. The Auricula — Primula auricula, the bear's ear, the mountain cowslip — was one of the great passions of European horticulture from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, inspiring florists' societies, competitive shows, and some of the most exquisite botanical illustrations ever made. Two of those illustrations appear on the covers of this journal: one from Amsterdam in 1794, one from the ducal gardens of Schleswig-Holstein in 1649.
The Florists' Flower
The Auricula is native to the Alps and the Apennines, where it grows on rocky ledges and in mountain meadows at altitudes that would discourage most garden plants. It arrived in northern Europe in the sixteenth century, carried by Flemish refugees and Huguenot weavers who brought their horticultural traditions with them as they fled religious persecution. By the seventeenth century it had become one of the most prized flowers in the gardens of England, the Netherlands, and the German states — not for its fragrance, which is mild, but for its extraordinary range of colour and form.
The Auricula was a florists' flower, in the old sense of the word: a flower cultivated by florists, meaning enthusiasts who devoted themselves to the perfection of a single species. The florists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not professional gardeners but tradesmen, weavers, and craftsmen who competed at shows to produce the most perfectly formed specimens — flowers with a precise circular outline, a clearly defined paste centre, and petals of a single, pure colour. The vocabulary they developed — alpine, show, border, double — is still used by Auricula growers today.
The Gottorfer Codex, 1649–1659
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Duke Frederick III of Holstein-Gottorp commissioned one of the most ambitious botanical projects of the Baroque era. The gardens of Gottorf Castle, on the outskirts of Schleswig, were among the finest in northern Europe — a collection of thousands of plants assembled from across the known world, maintained by a staff of gardeners and documented with a thoroughness that reflected the Duke's conviction that the natural world was a subject worthy of the most serious scholarly attention.
To document the gardens, Frederick commissioned Hans-Simon Holtzbecker, a Hamburg flower painter of exceptional skill, to produce a complete visual record of every plant in the collection. The result was the Gottorfer Codex — four volumes of gouache paintings on vellum, completed between 1649 and 1659, containing over 800 plates. It is one of the great monuments of 17th-century natural history art.
Holtzbecker's technique was gouache on vellum: opaque watercolour applied to prepared animal skin, a medium that allowed for a density and luminosity of colour that paper could not match. The Auricula plate in Volume 2 presents eight varieties of Primula × pubescens — the cultivated hybrid — arranged in the symmetrical, catalogue-like disposition of a royal garden inventory. Each flower is rendered with a precision that records not just the colour but the texture of the petals, the powdery farina of the centre, the particular habit of the leaves. It is not merely an illustration. It is the record of a garden nearly four hundred years old.
Nederlandsch Bloemwerk, 1794
A century and a half later, in Amsterdam, the publisher J.B. Elwe issued Nederlandsch Bloemwerk — Dutch Floral Work — a collection of botanical engravings that represented the late flowering of the great Dutch tradition of natural history illustration. The tradition had its roots in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, in the work of Maria Sibylla Merian and Jan Moninckx, and it had never entirely lost its commitment to the idea that scientific accuracy and artistic beauty were not in conflict but were, in the best work, inseparable.
The Auricula plate — Plate 13 — is characteristic of the Nederlandsch Bloemwerk at its finest. A Primula auricula in full bloom occupies the centre of the composition, its floral stem surrounded by a dynamic constellation of lepidoptera: butterflies, moths, and caterpillars depicted at various stages of their life cycle. The floating arrangement of insects creates a visual movement that is entirely characteristic of the finest Dutch illustration of the period — a neoclassical sensibility that sought a deliberate balance between naturalistic precision and decorative beauty.
Nederlandsch Bloemwerk is one of the least common of the major Dutch botanical publications. Complete copies are rare; individual plates appear occasionally at auction and in specialist print dealers. The Auricula plate is among the most sought after.
Two Golden Ages
What unites these two images, separated by a century and a half, is the conviction that the Auricula was worth this level of attention — that a flower cultivated in a mountain garden or a florist's backyard was a subject worthy of the finest artists and the most expensive materials. The Gottorfer Codex was produced for a duke; the Nederlandsch Bloemwerk was produced for the educated public of the Dutch Enlightenment. Both took the Auricula seriously as an object of beauty and of knowledge.
That seriousness is what makes these images still compelling today. They are not decorative in the superficial sense — they are documents of a culture that believed the natural world deserved to be looked at carefully, recorded precisely, and preserved for those who would come after.
The Journal
The Auricula Journal carries both plates: the Nederlandsch Bloemwerk engraving on the front cover, the Gottorfer Codex gouache on the back. 150 lined pages, casewrap sewn binding, matte laminated full-wrap cover. A journal for those who believe that writing deserves beautiful company.
