HEBRARIUM

Four illustrated books that made the plant legible

Cannabis in the herbals

Before photography, a plant had to be drawn into knowledge.

A good botanical image was not decoration.
It was evidence.

It helped the reader recognise a plant, compare its parts, remember its form and place it inside medicine, agriculture or household use. For cannabis, this matters deeply. Long before the modern leaf became a symbol of identity, protest, prohibition or branding, hemp and cannabis appeared in herbals as plants to be named, described and understood.

The image made the plant legible.
These four books show that process especially well.

1. Leonhart Fuchs

Before photography, a plant had to be drawn into knowledge.

A good botanical image was not decoration.
It was evidence.

The image made the plant legible.
These four books show that process especially well.

Why the image mattered

Before photography,
plant knowledge depended heavily
on description,
comparison and drawing.

An illustration was not a decorative extra. It helped readers recognise form, compare structure and place a plant inside use, medicine or household knowledge.

Cannabis entered books not first as symbol, but as something that had to be seen clearly enough to be known.

2. John Gerard

The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes · 1597

In Gerard, hemp is not scandal.
It is practical knowledge.

John Gerard brings cannabis into one of the most important English-language herbal traditions. His Herball, first published in 1597, was a large illustrated work giving practical information on more than 1,000 plants, with around 2,150 woodcuts. Each entry typically supplied names, description, place and season of growth, and “tempers” and “vertues” — the language of use and medicinal character in its time.

The hemp chapter is valuable because it shows the plant as practical infrastructure. Gerard discusses male and female hemp in the older botanical language of the period, and connects the plant to seed, fibre and use. His text states, for example, that “the male is called Carl Hemp, and Winter Hemp” and “the female, Barren Hemp, and Summer Hemp”.

We should not mistake this for modern botany.
It belongs to the historical language of plant description and use.

Gerard’s hemp is not counterculture, not criminality, not branding. It is a useful plant inside an English herbal: named, separated, described and placed in a practical world of medicine, fibre and household economy.

This is why Gerard belongs here.

He shows cannabis
before modern stigma narrowed the frame.

3. Elizabeth Blackwell

A Curious Herbal · 1737–1739

Blackwell did not only draw plants.
She turned survival into botanical work.

Elizabeth Blackwell is essential.

Not only because she illustrated hemp, but because her work stands at the meeting point of botanical illustration, medical use, women’s labour and survival.

A Curious Herbal was issued between 1737 and 1739 and contained 500 engraved images of medicinal plants. It was the first significant herbal produced by a British woman and is recognised as a major achievement in medical botany and botanical illustration.

The story behind it is remarkable, but it should be handled carefully. Blackwell undertook the work partly as a desperate effort to raise money to free her husband from debtors’ prison. Encouraged by figures including Sir Hans Sloane and Isaac Rand, she took lodgings near the Chelsea Physic Garden and began drawing plants from life. Her husband supplied nomenclature from prison.

Her hemp plates matter because they show cannabis inside the medical-plant world of the 18th century. We should be careful with plate numbers, because online references are inconsistent: reliable catalogue records identify The Female Hemp as Cannabis foemina in A Curious Herbal.

For LIBERA HERBA, Blackwell is more than a botanical illustrator.

She is a reminder that knowledge has labour behind it:
drawing, engraving, colouring, naming, publishing, surviving.

4. William Woodville

Medical Botany · 1790–1793

The herbal becomes medical botany
when the image serves prescription,
not curiosity alone.

William Woodville moves the story into a more explicitly medical-botanical frame.

His Medical Botany was published in London between 1790 and 1793. The Biodiversity Heritage Library records the work as containing systematic and general descriptions of medicinal plants, with plates by James Sowerby.

This is important because the visual register changes.

The plant is no longer only in the broad world of the herbal. It is placed inside a more systematic medical reference. Another library description notes that Woodville intended to educate medical practitioners about the plants they prescribed, and that the work contained hand-coloured engravings by Sowerby.

Woodville and Sowerby therefore belong
close to the medical-botanical side of the archive.

Cannabis appears not as folklore, but as a plant that could be catalogued, illustrated and discussed in relation to materia medica. We should not overstate the work as “the manual for all European pharmacists”, but it is safely described as an influential late 18th-century British work of medical botany.

What the books changed

These books did more
than record cannabis and hemp.
They stabilised
how the plant could be seen.

Illustration made recognition possible.
Naming made comparison possible.
Printing made circulation possible.

Before the modern cannabis leaf became a symbol, these books treated the plant as something to be studied, handled, classified and drawn into knowledge.

Factual Note

Leonhart Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium was published in 1542 with hundreds of woodcut plant illustrations and unusual acknowledgement of the artists involved: Albrecht Meyer, Heinrich Füllmaurer and Veit Rudolf Speckle. John Gerard’s Herball was first published in 1597 and presented practical English-language plant knowledge, including a chapter on hemp.

Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal appeared between 1737 and 1739 with 500 engravings of medicinal plants and includes hemp plates such as The Female Hemp / Cannabis foemina. William Woodville’s Medical Botany was published between 1790 and 1793, with plates by James Sowerby, and represents a more systematic medical-botanical treatment of medicinal plants.