Although Ehret worked closely with the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), he always favoured the pictorial rather than the diagrammatic style of botanical illustration. Here he has painted the seeds with shadows as if they were actually lying on the page. But the flower itself is represented according to the standard conventions of botanical illustration - that is, in silhouette against a white ground.

Ehret began to use vellum for his original watercolours after seeing the velins du roi, the great collection of botanical and animal portraits on vellum begun under Gaston d'Orléans, the younger brother of Louis XIII of France. He visited the collection in Paris in the winter of 1734-5.