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.

Ehret was involved in publicising and promoting the binomial system of plant classification that was devised by his friend the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). However, the caption to this piece does not use the Linnaean naming system but prefers the older method of using a string of descriptive Latin terms which he has taken from French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708).

Linnaeus was the first scientist to classify plants not according to the way people used them, but rather by the physical similarities between their reproductive parts. The influence of this new system is apparent in this drawing in that it privileges the reproductive elements - the flowers and the fruit - above other plant parts.