A page of watercolour studies depicting five Double Columbines and two Duke Cherries. Annotated with identifications on the verso.

These watercolour studies form a page from Alexander Marshal's Florilegium, or flower-book, an album which comprises 159 folios depicting over 600 different plants as well as animals, birds and insects. As was typical for such an album, the watercolours were arranged more or less seasonally by Marshal, who also annotated the versos of the sheets with identifications, in English and Latin, of the plants depicted. Marshal was a gentleman with strong connections amongst the seventeenth-century gardening milieu, and the Florilegium records the flowers that he had in his own gardens and those in the gardens of his friends.