Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium.

ABSTRACT: We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as "Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers", suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, "Cibo", Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book's watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous orig

SUBMITTER: Stefanaki A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6594601 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature