Beautiful Botanical Prints: Make Great Gifts and Home Decor Items

Learn where you can find free botanical prints and create your own works of art for yourself or for gifts. Easy to frame and to make cards from.

Botanical prints or illustrations date back hundreds of years and were found in books called herbals, which recorded drawings of plant specimens used for medicinal purposes. Today they continue to be studied and are prized as works of art.

Many are on display in exhibits such as those found at The Hunt Institute, part of Carnegie Mellon University, which maintains over 30,000 botanical illustrations including watercolors, drawings, and prints.

Crafting with Free Botanical Prints

Did you know that there are a variety of public domain beautiful botanical prints available online? This means that they are free to use as you like.

As a gardener and a plant lover, I find botanical prints especially beautiful and so I've compiled a list so you don't have to.

First, let me give you a few ideas of what you can do with them:

• Frame in black frame (gold or other) hang on your wall in a collage or horizontal line.
• Print on card stock and make gift tags or thank you notes.
• Use as your laptop wallpaper.
• Transfer to fabric and make pillows. Click here to see a previous post where I made pillows with botanical prints
• Make labels for your handmade gifts.

 As a bonus, I am adding links to some cards I made that you can simply print on card stock and cut to use as note cards for yourself or print several as a gift for a friend.

Simply click on the picture for a .pdf of the print.

  

Here is a list of great resources where you can print your own botanical prints.

Missouri Botanical Gardens

The Graphics Fairy

Vintage Printables

Wikimedia2

Wikimedia3

Reusable Art