New Zealand

Antique Botanical Prints of New Zealand Native Flora

This category brings together original antique botanical prints depicting the native flora of New Zealand — the remarkable plant communities of the islands of Aotearoa, which attracted the attention of European botanists and illustrators from the earliest voyages of exploration through to the systematic botanical surveys of the 19th century. These works represent an important chapter in the illustrated documentation of the southern hemisphere’s extraordinary plant diversity, combining scientific observation with the artistic quality of period botanical illustration at its finest.

The botanical documentation of New Zealand flora begins with the voyages of James Cook, whose naturalists — above all Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on the first voyage, and Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg on the second — collected plant specimens and produced drawings of New Zealand species that entered the scientific literature and the illustrated botanical record. Sydney Parkinson’s botanical drawings from the first voyage, many of which were eventually engraved for the posthumously published Florilegium, include New Zealand subjects that remain among the earliest illustrations of the country’s distinctive flora.

The 19th century brought a more systematic approach to the botanical documentation of New Zealand. Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Flora Novae-Zelandiae, published in the 1850s as part of the botanical results of the Erebus and Terror expedition, provided the first comprehensive illustrated treatment of the New Zealand flora at a scientific level, with engraved plates that documented species across the full range of New Zealand’s plant communities. Hooker’s work established the foundation for subsequent botanical study and illustration of New Zealand plants, and prints from his publications are among the most scientifically important New Zealand botanical illustrations available to collectors.

New Zealand’s distinctive flora — including the tree ferns, kauri, pohutukawa, kowhai and the many endemic species found nowhere else — has continued to attract botanical illustrators whose work combines scientific documentation with an appreciation of the extraordinary visual character of a flora shaped by millions of years of isolation. Antique prints of New Zealand botanical subjects are collected for their scientific importance, their rarity as records of a distinctive southern hemisphere flora, and their decorative appeal as works of botanical illustration of considerable beauty.