Plant Images
Photographs and drawings of plants can be helpful to writers in at least three ways:
1) You may need a reminder about what a particular plant looks like as you write about it. Maybe your story needs to begin in a lilac wood (like, say, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn). What, exactly, is the shape of a lilac leaf? Will lilac branches throw straight or crooked shadows on a moonlit path? Or maybe a night-blooming Cereus is central to imbuing an Arizona night with magic (as in Barbara Kingsolver's Bean Trees). How big are those flowers and what is their shape? How big does the plant get, and how many flowers are on there? Do they hang singly or in clusters?
2) You may be writing about a particular place and need to find out what the plants you found there are called. So, there were tall trees around your parents' house, but were they maples or sycamores? Can you feel the words "maple" or "sycamore" melt in your mouth in a different way than the word "tree"? Plant identification just with the help of pictures can be difficult, but they certainly are a wonderful supplement to plant guide books.
3) You may need to rest your eyes on something as your brain does mysterious things to inspire your writing. Plant pictures can stimulate unexpected associations and kick the poetic fibers in your gray matter into overdrive--dream and let it happen.
If you have additional favorite plant image sites, please send me the links to post here.
Andrew Sipple's Fruit and Flower Pictures
A collection of images from Northwestern Pennsylvania wildflowers and wild plant fruits.
Arkive
A searchable database of still images and videos - yes, this is one place to go to watch plants in motion. Some of the videos allow you to pan out from the plant to its habitat, others are time-lapse clips of growth and development.
ArtPlantae
A website devoted to promoting botanical literacy through illustration. Interviews with artists, tips on the process of illustration, and links to botanical art projects.
Botany Photo of the Day
Maintained by the University of British Columbia, this site combines striking photography with detailed write-ups of exotic plants. Unfortunately, the image collection is searchable only through the University site's general search engine, which makes finding contents a bit of a hassle. If you know the Latin species name of the plant you are looking for, clicking on "Archives" and then "Archives by entry" will get you to an alphabetical list.
Centre for Bioscience Image Bank
A searchable database of freely available, copyright-cleared images for use in teaching and learning.
Inside Insides
What if you put plants, instead of people, into an MRI scanner to look at their inner anatomy? Take a peek and discover the hearts of lettuce and onions….
Pflanzenliebe
This site contains stunningly beautiful photographs of a wide range of species. Although the text is only provided in German, you can still find images of your favorite plant here, as long as you know the Latin species name.
USDA Plant Database
Image archives complemented by distribution maps.