Köhler’s dandelion plate is plate 5 in Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, a German book of medicinal plants. It appears in volume 1, completed in 1887. Walther Müller drew it, and it was printed in color as a chromolithograph.
What the plate shows
The main picture shows the plant at natural size: toothed leaves, flowers in bloom, closed buds and a round seed head. The long root is drawn beside it, with a slice of the root cut across. Enlarged figures show a flower head cut lengthwise, a single tiny flower, its anther tube split open, a grain of pollen, and the seed with and without its parachute of hairs. Köhler’s description of the plate ends with the credit “Nach der Natur von W. Müller,” German for “from nature, by W. Müller.” Müller’s initials, WM, appear in the bottom right corner, as they do on the grapevine plate.
The names
Köhler calls the plant Taraxacum officinale Weber. The first 2 words are its Latin name. The last word credits the man who gave it that name: Georg Heinrich Weber, a German botanist, in 1780. Before that, in 1753, Linnaeus had called the dandelion Leontodon taraxacum. Officinale marks a plant used in medicine.
Leontodon is Greek for “lion’s tooth.” The old Latin name Dens leonis, the French dent de lion and the English word dandelion all mean the same, after the plant’s toothed leaves.
The dandelion as medicine
Köhler lists 2 official medicines: the dried root, and the whole flowering plant with its root. The roots were dug in autumn, when, Köhler says, they are most bitter. Dandelion root was official in the British and American pharmacopoeias. Doctors used it as a bitter tonic for the stomach and as a mild laxative. It was long believed to help the liver, but by Köhler’s time, authors doubted this.
The Dandelion in our collection
The Dandelion in our botanical art collection is a replica of this plate, finished by hand in our workshop.
