Curators at Houghton Library are bringing a splash of green and other vibrant color to the building’s main lobby this summer with a new exhibition of rare and old botanical illustrations. Houghton Library’s summer exhibition of botanical illustrations displays ten works from Europe, the U.S., and Japan, many of them hundreds of years old. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINEThe current show features ten volumes of illustrations, originating in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. In the same way that the knowledge of new worlds brought back to Europe was deeply flawed, Braganza noted, some of the botanical illustrations within the reference book are outright inaccurate. Among the botanical illustrations, many were positioned to minimize sunlight because of their creators’ reliance on natural pigments to convey the precise color of the plants.