Botanical prints are the easiest art to hang badly. They are delicate, usually vertical, and often have a lot of white paper. Frame one wrong and it looks like a page torn from a catalogue. Frame it right and it looks like it came out of a country house. The difference is almost entirely mat and proportion.
Start with the mat, not the frame
A mat is the border of card between the print and the frame. For botanical prints it does two things: it keeps the paper off the glass, and it gives the plant room to breathe. Go wider than feels natural — 2.5 to 3 inches on a 16×24 print, 3 to 4 inches on a 24×36. A thin mat is the single most common mistake. Choose off-white or warm white rather than bright white; antique plates were printed on cream paper and a stark white mat makes the paper look dirty. If the print has a built-in border, as ours do, you can mat it tighter or float-mount it and let the border do the work.
Frame: thin, and quieter than the print
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plates were made for books, so there is no "correct" period frame. What works is restraint. A thin profile (half an inch to an inch) in black, dark walnut, or natural oak suits almost everything. Gold works for Redouté's roses and lilies if the gold is matte and thin; a fat ornate gold frame will fight the print. For the black-background Dietzsch and Delany works, a black frame with a wide off-white mat is close to unbeatable.
Glass
Standard glass is fine for a print that isn't in direct sun. If it will get light, choose UV-filtering acrylic — lighter, safer, and it protects the inks. Skip "non-glare" glass; it softens the fine stipple detail that makes these prints worth hanging.
Grouping
Botanicals love company. The classic arrangements are a pair (two prints from the same artist, same size, side by side with a hand's width between), a column of three, or a grid of four or six. Keep frames and mats identical across the group; let the plants provide the variety. Mixing Redouté with Thornton works because both are the same scale of drawing; mixing a delicate stipple engraving with a bold black-background piece usually doesn't.
Sizes that work
12×18 is a bookshelf or hallway size. 16×24 is the sweet spot for a pair over a console or dresser. 20×30 and 24×36 hold a wall on their own — a single Thornton at 24×36 above a sofa is a statement. When in doubt, go one size larger than you think; small prints on big walls are the second most common mistake.
Where to buy frames
Standard sizes are the whole reason to buy standard-sized prints. A 16×24 print fits an 18×24 or 20×28 frame with a mat; a 24×36 fits a 24×36 frame with no mat or a 30×40 with one. Any frame shop, or the off-the-shelf frames from the usual big retailers, will do; a custom frame makes sense for the 24×36 pieces.
About our prints
Every botanical print in The Plate Room is restored from an open-access museum scan of the original plate and printed to order on archival, acid-free matte paper. The built-in off-white border is sized so the print can be framed with or without a mat. Browse the botanical collection.