Aloe Africana, Flore Rubro

Native to southern Africa, aloes were grown in hothouses by English horticulturists as exotic specimens. In this image, German botanical illustrator Georg Ehret describes the full length of the plant’s flower cluster, illustrating a few buds separately and removing the outer petals of one, to give as much information as possible. Before settling in England, Ehret had collaborated with Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the practice of binomial nomenclature, the Latin naming system still used today to identify the genus and species parts of the formal scientific name. According to Linnaeus, the configuration of the male and female organs determines the plant’s class and order (2022).