Contents: About the Collection | About the Project | Tech

About the Collection

This collection consists of illustrations from three different sources:

• The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes / gathered by John Gerarde of London, master in chirurgerie, by John Norton, 1597.
• Botanical watercolours by Ellen Arabella Whinfield, 1835-1884.
• Our edible toadstools and mushrooms and how to distinguish them; a selection of thirty native food varieties, easily recognizable by their marked individualities, with simple rules for the identification of poisonous species, by W. Hamilton Gibson, 1895.

This collection of images is significant because most of them have not been digitized. Many of the names are not included with the illustration or are simply outdated so I have identified them and listed them as their current taxonomic names so as to portray them more accurately to current scientific standards. I have listed the printing method for each illustration, as well. There are no artists listed for The herball as woodcuts generally do not have an artist’s signature.

I used these sources to identify the mushrooms and fungi:

• https://www.mushroomexpert.com/index.html
• https://www.gbif.org/
• https://explorer.natureserve.org/

Rights and Permissions

The sources I used are all 129+ years old and are not subject to copyright. However, the sources are all owned by the Lilly Library who has official rights to the sources.

About the Project

This site was created by Lorrainna (Rae) Davis for the ILS-Z 652 Digital Libraries final project.

Special thanks to John Walsh and Gyuri Kang, the course instructor and assistant for their help in developing this website. A special thanks to Sarah Hensler, because I don’t think I would have finished without her help and site as a reference. A further thank you to Hannah Kish, Digitization Assistant at the Lilly Library, for ensuring permission to take photos and use the sources for my class project.