A product of The Age of Enlightenment, Flora Danica is a comprehensive atlas of botany, containing folio-sized pictures of all the wild plants native to Denmark, as of 1874.

It was proposed by G. C. Oeder, then professor of botany at the Danish Royal Botanical Institution, in 1753 and was completed 123 years later, in 1883. The complete work comprises 51 parts and 3 supplements, containing 3,240 copper engraved plates.

In 1790 the Danish Crown Prince Frederik ordered a dinner set made decorated with exact copies of the plates of Flora Danica. The dinner set was supposedly meant as a gift for Russian Empress Catherine II. Catherine, however, never received it, as she died in 1796.

The dinner set is still in use for state occasions in the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen. Copies of the set are sold by the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory.

External links

• Flora Danica (http://www.royalcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/webapp/products?show=6). The Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory's page on the Flora Danica dinner set.
• Flora Danica Online (http://www.pictures.dnlb.dk/). The complete Flora Danica scanned by the Danish National Library of Science and Medicine.