80 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
BORRAGINACE. 
The generic name commemorates the artistic and scientific labors of Georg Dionysius Ehret,’ a 
botanical painter of the eighteenth century. 
1 Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770) was born in the grand 
duchy of Baden, where his father was gardener to Charles, Prince 
of Baden Bulach, a patron of botany and horticulture. Ehret early 
displayed a talent for drawing, and a collection of five hundred 
paintings of flowers which he made in the ducal gardens was 
purchased by Dr. Trew, the distinguished physician and botanist of 
Nuremberg. With the money which he obtained in this way he 
was able to travel through Germany, Switzerland, and France, and 
visiting Paris found employment in painting the flowers in the Jar- 
din du Roi under the direction of Jussieu. He crossed to London, 
but soon returned to the continent, and in 1736 was working in 
George Clifford’s famous garden in Amsterdam, where he was 
found by Linnzus, under whose eye he prepared the drawings for 
the Hortus Cliffortianus. Ehret returned to London in 1740, mar- 
ried a sister of Philip Miller of the Physic Garden at Chelsea, and 
passed the remainder of his life in England occupied in flower- 
painting and in teaching his art. Of his published drawings, which 
represent a small part of his accomplishment, the most important 
are the illustrations of the sumptuous Plante Selecte, of which 
seven decades were issued by Trew and three by Vogel after the 
death of the former. He drew the figures for Patrick Browne’s 
Natural History of Jamaica, and drew and engraved a, series of 
tables of exotic plants and butterflies, published in London in 1748- 
1759. Several papers on botanical subjects written by Ehret, 
including an account of the Sassafras-tree of North America, were 
printed in the Nova Acta Academie Curiosorum. 
