About

An independent archive of botanical image-making

We're two designers, drawn to the natural beauty of plants — their colors, their shapes, the small details you only notice when you look closely.
We photograph the plants we find, trying out different ways to capture them: pressed and lit from behind, scanned floating in a dark box, and other botanical imaging techniques old and new. Alongside the images, we collect what we learn — what each plant is called, where it grows, the odd fact worth knowing — and we're still learning to identify them ourselves. Part of the point is getting better at seeing.
We're just as interested in the people who do this well — the artists, past and present, who've found their own ways of picturing plants — and we feature their work alongside our own.
The site is two things at once: an archive of the plants we've gathered, and a growing knowledge base about botanical imaging — its methods, its history, and the people exploring it. It gets a little bigger every time we find something worth adding.

The two of us

Julian Auch

Product designer · collects the plants and makes the images

Jonathan Auch

Graphic designer · builds the archive, its formats and printed forms

269 specimens·111 species·5 techniquesView the register

How a specimen enters the archive

01FoundGathered on foot, named, carried home
02Pressed (Optional)Flattened and dried the same day
03Given to lightScanned, backlit, sunned, or impressed
04NumberedEntered into the register with a permanent accession

The archive accepts specimens from other makers. Submissions are reviewed before publication.