The Book of Plants

At the house where Cornelia lives she has many plants for company — olive trees, wild roses and jasmine, nettles and brambles, thistles, sage, mint and rosemary. Cornelia has always been enchanted by plants and she can’t live without having them around — many of them! In her book "The Green Kingdom" that she wrote in collaboration with the ethnobotanist Tammi Hartung you have to solve ten riddles to explore the magical world of plants and all the stories humans told about them. And of course there is also a book dedicated to plants in her workshop at Fraggina: a hardbound book (bound in Volterra) that contains lists of the wild plants that live on the grounds. Each artist visiting is asked to paint a portrait of one. The book is quite a magical thing by now, as magical as the plants described in it.

Photos: Michael Orth