A guide to Mrs Delany’s most depicted paper plants

Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden asks us to look slowly at the collages made by Mary Delany, the ingenious eighteenth-century artist who translated coloured paper into convincing botanical worlds and, at seventy-two, began a remarkable new body of work. This guide to the plants most frequently depicted in Mrs. Delany’s Paper Garden focuses on the recurring flowers, their identifying features, and the cultural stories they carry. It is not a key to every specimen, but a way to recognise the visual signatures of her garden.

Delany assembled each plant from cut, tinted and layered pieces of printed paper, often adding leaves, seedpods and insects to a single bloom. Some forms are scientifically exact; others combine separate stages or borrow from familiar botanical images. Reading them therefore means noticing structure as well as surface: the pleated lip of an iris, the speckled cup of a fritillary, the architecture hidden inside a dense rose. These clues let modern viewers appreciate both her botanical eye and her playful artifice.

How Delany built a garden from paper

Printed papers supplied colour and pattern; Delany painted missing shades, cut individual petals with fine scissors and overlapped them to create depth. Stems and leaves turn specimens into complete plants, while butterflies, beetles and bees extend the imagined habitat. The method can reward anyone who enjoys close visual reading, much as a panel-by-panel illustrated narrative does; comics and visual reviews offer a parallel in showing how sequence and image can carry narrative without conventional plot.

Her choices also resist the neatness of a modern field guide. A flower may face us frontally while its stem bends sideways; leaves may be too large or a fruit too ripe; several related forms can share one composition. This mixture made the collages persuasive to eighteenth-century viewers yet keeps them alive today. Delany’s garden is a performance of accuracy, not a frozen specimen cabinet.

Tulips and roses

Tulips are among the most conspicuous recurring subjects. Their cup-shaped blossoms, broad outer tepals and pointed inner petals make them readable even when paper colours run from flame red to cream or broken purple. Delany often showed several flowers together, allowing differences in petal count and stripe to register. The tulip’s earlier status as a novelty in European gardens also suited a work concerned with collecting, spectacle and plant fashion.

Roses recur in fuller arrangements: layered blooms, mossy buds, open flowers and curling stems. Their overlapping petals give Delany room to model shadow without paint blending, while thorns and sepals keep the forms botanical. In Australian gardens, both are familiar icons of the cool-season flower border. Melbourne’s variable springs make the crisp tulip silhouette especially satisfying, while Sydney’s milder winters often encourage roses to carry their display into spring.

Irises, lilies and fritillaries

Iris flowers are identifiable by their divided display: three upright standards frame three drooping falls, often marked with a fuzzy beard. Sword-like leaves rise behind the bloom, and Delany used their firm, linear shapes to balance the flower’s folded papers. Bearded irises, flag irises and smaller forms appear throughout the garden, so colour alone is less useful than the arrangement of standards, falls and foliage.

The lily group adds pendulous bells and emphatic crowns. White lilies, turk’s-cap forms, crown imperials and checkered fritillaries were favourite motifs because their petals can be opened, bent and layered to suggest thickness. The crown imperial’s tuft of narrow leaves resembles a small fountain above the flowers; the guinea-hen fritillary nods beneath its checkerboard pattern. Australian spring displays of lilies and irises can be traced at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, where labels help connect familiar hybrids to the older forms Delany drew.

Poppies, peonies and carnations

Poppies bring movement to the collages. Their thin, creased petals flare from dark centres, while hairy stems, divided leaves and rounded seed capsules extend the story beyond the blossom. Delany showed buds, flowers and fruit with equal care, sometimes placing an insect at the edge as if caught in the display. The contrast between delicate petal and emphatic capsule is one of her most convincing botanical effects.

Peonies appear as generous domes of curled paper, often accompanied by divided foliage. Carnations and pinks bring a different rhythm: narrow, toothed petals form dense heads above slender stems and tubular calyces. These three plants may look decorative in isolation, but Delany’s grouping exposes their differences. Her compositions also resemble the generous mixed bouquets still seen at Australian flower stalls, such as the florist counters at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, where one bloom can be compared instantly with another.

Columbines, sweet peas and small-scale wonders

Many of Delany’s most engaging sheets are not dominated by huge flowers. Columbines are drawn through their hooked spurs and lobed leaves; sweet peas through paired leaflets, tendrils and butterfly-like standards; auriculas through dense umbels held above broad, wrinkled leaves. The passionflower, too, offered a ready emblematic structure, with radiating petals, a corona of filaments and three prominent styles. Such plants reward attention to joints and centres rather than overall colour.

Insects magnify that attention. A bee at an open flower, a beetle on a leaf or a butterfly above a spray can establish scale and suggest pollination. The smaller plants also make good guides for beginners visiting collections: look first for a distinctive leaf, then for the flower’s symmetry, and only afterwards for colour. At Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, where subtropical growth surrounds the visitor, the contrast between living luxuriance and Delany’s finite cut-paper universe is especially striking.

What the recurring plants reveal

The recurring plants reveal more than a taste for beauty. Tulips and crown imperials carried associations with rarity, trade and princely collecting; roses signalled cultivation, character and classical mythology; passionflowers had been read as religious symbols. By placing these forms beside insects and ordinary garden plants, Delany joined private pleasure, learned curiosity and global exchange. The garden records an age when a single bloom could be both specimen and story.

For modern Australian readers, that history has a local edge. Botanic institutions in Adelaide and Brisbane preserve plants shaped by different climates, while local nurseries sell native species that Delany could not have included. An Australian garden is therefore not a substitute for her European scenes, but a useful counterpoint: it shows how the same plant changes when moved across oceans, or how a local species fills a role once occupied by an imported flower. The names on modern labels can also reveal older synonyms used in eighteenth-century sources.

Viewing the plants in their original cultural setting also changes the mood of the garden. Rooms, clothing, book culture and conventions of collecting all shaped what an educated viewer expected to see. Molly Peacock’s Georgian era reading guide supplies useful background on those habits, while the plants themselves remain the quickest route into Delany’s world: cut a petal free of its flower, and you can still imagine the garden that surrounded it.

Bring the paper garden into view

To read Delany’s plants as a visitor, begin with repetition. Notice how often the same shape changes colour, how stems lead the eye upward, and how the insects sit at points of visual balance. Then compare paper with planting: a real tulip in Melbourne’s cooler spring, a rose in Sydney’s humidity and an iris in a botanic garden collection can confirm details that a photograph alone may flatten. A small notebook is often more useful than a camera because it encourages slower looking.

Those observations can lead directly to the book. Visit The Paper Garden book for details about Molly Peacock’s account, its illustrations and how to encounter Delany’s work; follow one recurring flower from introduction to the final pages, and see whether its changing forms reveal a hidden connection to the larger story of a life remade through attention. Begin with the plant that draws you in, then let the garden unfold around it.