Gallica: botany from France's National Library
A Gallica board with nearly a thousand botanical drawings, herbaria and pages from old textbooks, all drawn from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
What it is
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and it runs dozens of themed boards on Pinterest. Botanique is one of the biggest: 983 pins when we checked, with the latest added in spring 2026. You'll find 17th-century plant drawings, pages from 19th-century school botany books, hand-painted flower albums, herbaria and even early photos of Mexican flora donated to the library in the early 1900s.
Captions are mostly in French, sometimes Latin, but they're short: book or drawing title, author, year. The images need no translation.
Why we picked it
This kind of illustration usually floats around the internet with no credit. Here every image has a source. Pins lead back to Gallica, where you can open the whole book and flip through neighboring pages. Our favorite find was a run of drawings by Johann Walter from the 1660s: pomegranates, lemons, figs and apricots sharing the page with moths and seashells, half still life and half science plate.
It's also still active. The librarians keep adding to it, so this isn't a board frozen in Pinterest's early years.
Where to start
- Look for Johann Walter's fruit and flower drawings from 1661 to 1672.
- Open the Album Vilmorin pins for hand-colored garden flowers and vegetables.
- Find Duhamel du Monceau's treatise on fruit trees, a classic of the genre.
- Search the board for pins marked photographie to see early plant photos and exhibitions.
- Click through any pin you like and read the full book on Gallica.
Who it's for
Illustrators hunting for plant references, gardeners with a soft spot for heirloom varieties, biology teachers and anyone who loves beautiful old books. If you're building a vintage botanical mood board, this will save you hours.
Quick answers
Do I need French? No. Captions are in French and Latin, but the pictures speak for themselves and titles are easy to run through a translator.
Where do the images come from? From the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collections, digitized on Gallica; pins link to the scanned books.
Is the board still updated? Yes, the most recent pin when we checked was added in April 2026.
