The Hidden Anatomy of the Fig: Ehret, Macfarlane, and Two Centuries of Botanical Illustration
The fig holds a secret that eluded casual observation for centuries: it is not, in the strict botanical sense, a fruit at all. What we eat is a syconium — an inverted floral receptacle enclosing hundreds of tiny flowers within its fleshy walls. To reveal this hidden architecture, eighteenth-century botanical science turned to dissection. In 1750, Georg Dionysius Ehret made the invisible visible.