One Of The Many Delights,

for both of us,

when visiting the UK is to visit Kew Gardens, and go to the waterlily house, which houses amongst others the famous giant waterlily, the Amazon’s Victoria regia (now called Victoria amazonica),

and with that in mind I stumbled upon these six magnificent colour lithographs, 

they are in a work by amateur botanist John Fisk Allen which documents his attempts to propagate the water lily in the more northerly climes of his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, 

the wonderfully lavish plates accompanying the slim volume are the work of the British-born printer William Sharp, who is credited with creating the very first lithotint with colours printed from a single stone on American soil, a portrait of Reverend F. W. P. Greenwood, 

these images produced for John Fisk Allen’s book are, according to Christies, the “very first colour-printed lithographs produced in America”, using multiple stones, the process known as chromolithography,

in the book, a slim volume called, The Great Water Lily of America: With a Brief Account of its Discovery and Introduction into Cultivation(1854), he outlines comprehensively his attempts to propagate the plant,

 these water lily images by Sharp stand out as some of the finest examples of chromolithography, an art which at the time was only in its infancy, back to Kew gardens, the Waterlily House, which has been there for some time,

the size of the Victoria amazonica has to be seen to be believed as can be seen from Miss Cotton, daughter of Kew's Herbarium Keeper Arthur Cotton, sitting on a lily pad of Victoria amazonica, what a fabulous plant I really wish we could see it again.