A page of watercolours depicting seven plants and a dead Jay. The plants are two Purple crocuses (Crocus vernus Hill), a crocus from Susa (Crocus susianus Ker-Gawler), double-form liverwort (Hepatica nobilis Miller 'Caerulea Plena'), and two poppy anemones (Anemone coronaria L.). The Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius) appears to cast a shadow on the sheet, as though a real bird has fallen onto a page of painted flowers.

Alexander Marshal was a talented horticulturalist, entomologist and amateur artist. He was one of a network of gardeners working in and around London in the middle of the seventeenth century, and had links with the Tradescants (who had a garden at Lambeth) and Henry Compton (who, as Bishop of London, developed a fine garden at Fulham Palace). Marshal’s careful study of plants was combined with an examination of the science of painting and he wrote in 1667 to the Secretary of the Royal Society to discuss the methods he used for making pigments: ‘I thought Seven years agon [ago], that I Knew much, but I find, that practice shows me daily more than I Knew before…. the Searche of Colours has Cost me much time in finding out, and to know, which would hold Colour in water, and mixe well, else I had not used them in my booke, and am shure will bee as fresh a hundred years hence, as when you Saw them Last.’ The colours in Marshal’s paintings do indeed remain impressively bright over 350 years later.