Home / Images of Plant Fossils / Plant Photographs

The American Geological Institute (AGI), Alexandria, VA: The Earth Science World ImageBank. This ImageBank is designed to provide quality geoscience images to the public, educators, and the geoscience community. Click on one of the images below to browse that category or go to the Search Images page for an advanced search.

Ancient Forests International (AFI). AFI has been instrumental in the protection of primary forests around the world.

Karen Antell, Biology Department, Eastern Oregon University, La Grande: Plant Biology Images. Images about herbaceous stems, leaves, roots, embryos, fruits, fungi, protista, and non-vascular plants (Mosses, Liverworts). Provided for the students home study. Anyone else is free to use them for similar purpose, but not for commercial reproduction.
Still available through the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

Australian National Botanic Gardens and Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, Canberra:
Australian Plant Image Index. See especially:
! Digital images using Genus and species. This searches from over 28,000 photos that have been digitized.

Terese Barta, UW-Stevens Point, Mike Clayton, UW-Madison, Dave Hillier, UW-Stevens Point, Brad Mogen, UW-River Falls, Jim Perry, UW-Fox Valley, Jan Phelps, UW-Baraboo, Patricia Ploetz, UW-Stevens Point, Tom Volk, UW-La Crosse, & Bob Wise, UW-Oshkosh (page hosted by BioWeb, University of Wisconsin): UW-System Botanical Image Library. This site is devoted to making botanical images available and easily accessible for educational use. They aspire to provide a stable, maintained library of non-proprietary images that can be easily referenced by botanists designing their own educational applications

! The L. H. Bailey Hortorium Herbarium (BH).
BH at Cornell University is one of the largest university-affiliated collections of preserved plant material in North America. It includes Cornell's Wiegand Herbarium (CU), which was merged with BH in 1977. The combined herbaria now number ca. 860,000 specimens of algae, bryophytes, and vascular plants.

Phil and Jesse Bergman, Jungle Music Palms and Cycads, San Diego CA:
Cycads. Visit the
Cycad Photo Gallery. There are 437 pictures in the gallery.
Snapshot provided by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

Botanical art. A meeting place for botanical artists.

! The Botanical Society of America: The American Journal of Botany Cover Images Index. The collection on the page holding the cover images of the American Journal of Botany. A great set of images! See also:
! Online Image Collection. This page acts as a map to the entire collection. Images are classified in groups in which they were submitted for historical purposes, e.g. Carnivorous Plants, Cellular Communication Channels, Economic Botany, Floral Ontogeny, Lichens, Organography, Paleobotany, Phloem Development, Plant Anatomy, Plant Defense Mechanisms, Plant Geography ,Plant Morphology, Pollen, Xylem Development, Filicophyta, Psilophyta, Sphenophyta. Each image acts as a link to a page containing more information, and a larger version of the picture. If you are searching for a specific image, you can use the google search at the bottom of the page. Excellent!

Botanicus Digital Library.
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.

Botanische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Südwestdeutschland e.V. (in German):
Links.
Links zu Herbarien.
Links zu Bilddatenbanken.

CalPhotos, Digital Library Project, University of California, Berkeley: Plants.

The Canadian Nature Photographer, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
This website provides a resource for learning about nature photography, art and great places to visit and photograph Nature both in Canada and around the world. Worth checking out:
Photoshop Workbook 1 and Photoshop Workbook 2 (in PDF).
! Robert Berdan (2020): The Microscopic Beauty of Plants and Trees. How to prepare and photograph plant sections for viewing with a microscope.

! The Cornell University Plant Anatomy Collection (CUPAC).
CUPAC is an historically important collection of anatomical slide preparations of a wide array of plant parts. Slides are being imaged by volunteers and undergraduate student workers, and simultaneously barcoded and databased. Post-processing involves automated resizing and labeling as well as magnification calibration that allows online measurement tools to be used as overlays on the images. Superbly done!

! John D. Curtis, Biology Department, University of Wisconsin; Nels R. Lersten, Department of Botany, Iowa State University, and Michael D. Nowak, Biology Department, University of Wisconsin: Photographic Atlas of Plant Anatomy.

M.J. Dallwitz Australia (DELTA – DEscription Language for TAxonomy).
Descriptions, illustrations, interactive identification, and information retrieval from DELTA databases.

David L. Dilcher, Paleobotany Laboratory, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL: Dilcher's Swamp/Woods Leaf Images.

Leopold Dippel, Darmstadt, 1889-1893, Part 1 -3; (web site hosted by Kurt Stüber, Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung, Collection of historic and classical biology books): Handbuch der Laubholzkunde. Dicot trees and shrubs in Germany (in German).

! Europeana (Europeana is a thematic network funded by the European Commission). Europeana links you to books and other texts, as well as to images, sounds and videos. More than 4.6 million digital items.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

FreeFoto.com.

! Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg: Digitalisierte Literatur weltweit. An annotated link list (in German).

Josef Hlasek: Photo Gallery wildlife pictures, Plants.

Christian Ferdinand Hochstetter (1883): Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreichs in Bildern (in German). See also here (in PDF).

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
! Plants of the World Online.
Browse 1,424,000 global plant names, 202,500 detailed descriptions, and 372,400 images. Excellent!

Kurt Stüber´s Online Library. A collection of historic and modern biology books. Go to: BioLib alphabetic index of Latin plant species names. Latin names used in this index often do not correspond to modern botanical nomenclature. See for instance: Equisetum hyemale.

Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison:
! Teaching Images.
This collection of resources was originally organized to serve the needs of the students and instructors of the introductory course General Botany.

! The Missouri Botanical Garden Library St. Louis, Missouri (and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation): Rare Books. This website features 46 digitized volumes, in order to make them available to an international audience. Using the buttons (e.g. "Browse Titles", you can view the 16,133 pages and 2,050 botanical illustrations currently online. Excellent!

! Mineralienatlas (in German): Public Domain Bildquellen. A link directory of public domain picture resources.

Staffan Müller-Wille, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin.Kunsttexte.de: Text, Bild und Diagramm in der klassischen Naturgeschichte. PDF file (in German).
See also here.

National Gardening Association (NGA). NGA primarily helps home gardeners succeed, growing in health, knowledge, environmental awareness and enthusiasm, to make home and community gardens greener and more productive. They provide one of the leading educational gardening resource on the web.
Go to: ! The Garden.org Plants Database. More than 698,000 plants and 414,000 images in this database!

The National Plant Data Center (NPDC), Baton Rouge, LA (United States Department of Agriculture): The PLANTS Image Gallery. PLANTS currently has more than 16,000 plant photos and line drawings in the gallery.

! Daniel Nickrent, Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois: Botanical Image Data Bases. An annotated link list. This expired link is available through the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

Dan Nickrent and Karen Renzaglia, Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale: Land Plants Online. Snapshot taken by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

Nikon Microscopy: Digital Image Galleries Including diatoms and radiolarians.

Meckes & Ottawa GbR, Reutlingen, Germany: Eye of Science. Life in a microcosmic world. Colorized scanning electron microscopic images. Go to: Botany.

! Department of Plant Sciences, Oxford University: Virtual Field Herbarium. Thousands of images of plants, especially tropical ones. Most images are linked to herbarium specimens. The website includes a glossary of botanical terms and links to the literature relevant to field guides.

Pixelio.de. Pictures free of charge (in German).

! Phyto Images
Database hosted by the Cornell University Vascular Plant Herbarium. Software deveopment by Kevin C. Nixon and Jan De Laet).
This site includes a wide variety of vascular plant and bryophyte photos of high quality. Phyto Images belongs to DOL (DiversityofLife.org), which is a web interface based on the Encino Software Project. The Encino project is a unified set of software tools for storing, retrieving, and analyzing biodiversity. Superbly done!

! Plantillustrations.org (by Max Antheunisse and Jan Koeman).
Plantillustrations.org is a completely non-commercial website. On top you see 2 search boxes at the right. The white one is for entering scientific names, the grey one for vernacular ones.
You may likewise navigate from:
the List of currently included artists.
Don't miss the useful link list

Stan Richard, Universities Space Research Association (USRA), sponsored by NASA Goddard: Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD). EPOD highlights the diverse processes and phenomena which shape our planet and our lives. EPOD will collect and archive photos, imagery, graphics, and artwork with short explanatory captions and links exemplifying features within the Earth system.

! Alison Roberts, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI: Plant Anatomy BIO 311. The table of contents, lab schedule and an electronic copy of the lab manual in Adobe Acrobat pdf ("portable document format") are available for viewing online. The lab manual is also available for downloading and printing. The Slides are also organized by lab topic.
These expired links are available through the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

! Heinz Schneider, Botanical Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland: Botanical Image Database. See also: Picture Collections. A rated and annotated link list (in German).

Thomas Schoepke, Institute of Pharmacy, University of Greifswald: Plant Image Gallery. The "Plant Image Gallery" contains about 2.000 pictures. Additionally, a considerable number of close-ups are among them obtained by use of a microscope.

! F.H. Schweingruber and A. Börner (2018): The Plant Stem. A Microscopic Aspect. Open access!

Fritz Schweingruber and W. Landolt, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (an Institute of the ETH Board):
! Xylem Database. The Xylem database provides an anatomical description and classification of the xylem and phloem of herbs, shrubs and trees.

Fritz Schweingruber and W. Landolt, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (an Institute of the ETH Board): Dendrochronological Picture Database. 1400 slides cover most topics relevant to dendrochronology. Shown are general and species specific macroscopic and microscopic reactions to climate, extreme events and decomposition from all over the world.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego: Earthguide. Scripps Institution of Oceanography is one of the most important centers for marine science research, graduate training, and public service in the world. Go to: Image Library. An annotated link directory.

Gerd Seehawer:, Schneverdingen, Lower Saxony, Germany: Dendrological Plant Image Gallery.

Dan Skean, Albion College, Albion, Michigan: Albion College Vascular Plant Image Gallery. Images are listed by class and then alphabetically by family and scientific name.
Website outdated. The link is to a version archived by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

George Sly, Union High School, Dugger, Indiana (Classrooms of the 21th Century): Teaching Tropical Rainforest Biology. Go to: Plant Images.
Now recovered from the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.:
! Botany Collections. Search the Botanical Type Register, Plant Photo Images or Botanical Art.

! C. Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Plant Image Collection. A library of over 31,000 photographic images of plant species and plant habitats. See also: Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations. A database of more than 3000 botanical illustrations curated by the Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution. Excellent!

Iris Snyder, Special Collections Department, University of Delaware Library, Newark: The Art of Botanical Illustration. This online exhibition show the development of botanical illustration from early printed books to the present day. Topics are: Herbals, Travel and Exploration, Scientific Botany, Women Artists, Seed Catalogs, and Modern Botanicals.

The Society of Botanical Artists (SBA). SBA´s aim is bringing together botanical artists to create a focus for the art of botanical painting through the ages. Go to: Galleries.

P.F. Stevens and Hilary Davis, University of Missouri, St Louis, and Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis: Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Descriptive characterization of all angiosperm orders and families, including images, phylogenetic trees, the description of characters used complete family and order synonymies, a link directory and a bibliography.

Stock.XCHNG. Free stock photos.

The School of Biological Sciences and the University of Sydney Library, The University of Sydney:
eBot Plant Sciences Collection. This website provides access to a rich research collection of micrographs and plant images.

SysTax. A database system for systematics and taxonomy. The SysTax database system comprises concept-based botanical and zoological systematics, literature, botanic gardens, herbaria, and zoological collections, etc. Go to:
Picture Search, Taxon Browser, Botany.

Texas A&M Bioinformatics Working Group (and others): The Vascular Plant Image Gallery. A repository of over 7,500 plant images. Pages listed by family in alphabetical order. Now provided by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

! TinEye This is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.

! United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): The PLANTS Database. This database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. It includes names, plant symbols, checklists, distributional data, species abstracts, characteristics, images, crop information, automated tools, onward Web links, and references.

Robert Van Pelt, University of Washington, Seattle: Forest Giants. Photographs and drawings of the world's largest trees.

The Virtual Mirror, Inc. (Garden Web): HortiPlex Plant Database. The HortiPlex database contains plant images and data as well as links to information sources, images and vendors at other sites. There is also a nomenclature database which provides botanical information on each taxon.

! Visual Plants. Based on a scientific database, the program can be used for the visual determination of plants. Now with around 22000 images, mostly with geo-referenced information. You can search using taxon names or via plant characters.
Worth checking out: Dalitz, H. and Homeier, J. (2004): Visual Plants - An image based tool for plant diversity research. Lyonia, 6: 47-59.
See also here (in German).

Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, "Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte", newly edited by Moritz Willkomm, about 1887; (web site hosted by Kurt Stüber, Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung, Collection of historic and classical biology books): Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreichs nach dem Linné'schen System. In German. With 54 colored plates (650 figures)!

! Whoishostingthis.com: The Ultimate Guide to Free Stock Images for Students.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
! Public domain image resources.

Dennis Woodland (Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI), Botany Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Plant Systematics Collection. This web site provides structured access to a teaching collection of plant images representing over 250 families and 1000 genera of vascular plants.
This expired link is now available through the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

! The World of Teaching.
Over 1000 powerpoint presentations made by teachers are available for download.
Free Biology powerpoints. See e.g.:
Botany, Photomicrographs, Plant Tissues Lecture notes, Powerpoint presentation.