Köhler’s grapevine plate is plate 51 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 plate shows 2 branches at natural size: one in flower, and one with a bunch of green grapes and curling tendrils. Numbered details show a flower bud, a flower losing its petals, and a flower without them. Grape petals don’t spread open. They stay joined at the tip, and the growing stamens push them off in one piece, like a cap. Other details show the stamens, pollen, a grape cut lengthwise and across, and its seeds, whole and cut open. Müller’s initials, WM, appear in the bottom right corner, as they do on the dandelion plate.
The Latin name
Köhler calls the plant Vitis vinifera L. The L. stands for Linnaeus, who gave the grapevine this name in 1753. Vitis is Latin for “vine,” and vinifera means “wine-bearing.”
The grapevine as medicine
Köhler’s text lists raisins, currants (small dried grapes), and white and red wine as official medicines. The leaves, the tendrils, the unripe grapes and the sap that runs from cut stems in spring, called “tears of the vine,” had been official too. Köhler lists wine in 7 pharmacopoeias, including the German and American ones, and wine was the base for many other medicines. Fresh grapes went into the grape cure, a treatment offered in wine regions in the 1800s. The text also notes that the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered tartaric acid in 1769. It comes from tartar, the crystals that form in wine barrels.
The Grapevine in our collection
The Grapevine in our botanical art collection is a replica of this plate, finished by hand in our workshop.
