Colour and contemporary digital botanical illustration

Colour can simply be an attribute of a plant, but for scientific identification purposes, colour can also be diagnostic, distinguishing, or helping to distinguish, a plant from an otherwise similar species or cultivar. Hence the accurate recording of colour has been a feature of botanical illustration since its beginnings. New digital composite botanical illustrations, based largely on photography, can include far more colour information about a plant, both in terms of quantity and quality, than is possible by more traditional methods of colour description. Furthermore such digital composite illustrations allow a significant advance in the communication of such colour data.