Featured on PDR in the collection Phantom Bouquets: Two Books on the Art of Skeleton Leaves (1864)

These two short treatises, both published in 1864, detail the art of producing “phantom flowers”: snow-white bouquets of leaves and seeds reduced to their very veins. Part of a legacy of attempts to preserve fragile plants long beyond their lifespans — from Anna Atkins’ iconic cyanotypes to the tradition of drying herbarium specimens — scientists and artists have worked for centuries to capture floral ephemerality. Stemming from much older East Asian techniques for “skeletonizing” plants, first fully described in Europe by Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch, the “phantom” process of putrefaction, flesh removal, and chemical bleaching rivaled early modern anatomical practices in its complexity. Skeletonization crossed the Atlantic in the 1860s, quickly taking hold of a primarily American female public intent on combining the arts and…