This print uses the medium and the pictorial conventions of late 18th and early 19th century botanical illustrations. Delicate hand-colouring is used sparingly, so as not to obscure the outlines and details of physical structure. It has obvious stylistic similarities to the illustrations by Redouté, Franz and Ferdinand Bauer, Jacquin and others.

The image is a careful, detailed and convincingly scientific study - except that the species represented is obviously a creation of the artist's imagination. This plant is a kind of mutant, a specimen from science fiction, described with the seemingly dispassionate and disinterested gaze of a scientist. The plant is carefully spread out across the page, no part obscuring another, the leaves, the roots, the tendrils, and the overall habit of growth carefully and precisely delineated. It appears to obey the natural laws of plant structure as we understand them, and yet at the same time, in subtle yet self-evident ways, it flouts them. The chains and loops of the root are merely decorative embellishments, ornament not a source of sustenance. The details give a spurious substance to what we might think of as a 'possible' plant, or as an 'artist's impression' of a future plant. Thorpe has said "I've always been interested in creating my own world". Elsewhere he has made drawings of armour-plated star-petalled flowers, manifestations of his own minutely-invented universe. Thorpe seems to suggest that art - or at least figurative art - can create only a fictional universe, a world that is of the imagination, even when it uses the visual language of a closely observed reality.

Thorpe is one of several contemporary artists who have chosen to use plant form and the pictorial conventions of botanical illustration to explore ideas about the role of the artist, and questions of personal identity, and as a metaphor for art's role in society. This print complements other contemporary prints in the V&A collection by Michael Landy, and Christine Borland, as well as historic examples.

Much of Thorpe's work has involved the representation of marginal survivalist societies, in scenes evoking frontier life, and of cult communities. His 2004 show at Tate Britain, The Colonists, depicted a curious constructed world with fortified buildings set in forest landscapes, and with hybrid architectural/botanical specimens. Collage is favourite method of his, and this plant is a kind of seamless collage of disparate but plausibly related elements. The Kingdom Spear appears as a fragile living organism, with a weapon blooming at its heart, a sagitate leaf that has metamorphosed into the thing it is named for - a natural emanation from Thorpe's apocalyptic vision.