Currant - red fruit

Ribes rubrum - Redcurrant

Contrary to botanical usage, the fruit buds of the redcurrant bush are smaller than the wood buds: a rare anatomical detail that only the naturalist's eye can observe.

This 1 to 2-meter bush, with flexible branches, produces hanging clusters of small, translucent, vibrant red berries, crowned with the remnants of the flower.

The juice extracted from the fruit is naturally pale: it is the skin that imparts its pink hue, just as grapes color wine.

The alternate leaves, 8 to 10 centimeters wide, are divided into five toothed lobes ending in a glandular tip. The upper surface, dark green, is bare and grooved; the lower surface, pale green, has a slight pubescence.

The petiole, as long as the blade, widens at the base to protect the bud. The redcurrant branches reveal a singular structure: four superimposed barks, the two outer ones with circular fibers, the two inner ones with longitudinal fibers.

The flowers are born in simple, small, herbaceous clusters.

The globular, shiny, transparent fruit contains 3 to 4 seeds of varying shapes, oval or elongated like tears. The melting, pink flesh releases abundant, tangy, delicately scented water.

This plate is taken from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin's Traité des Arbres Fruitiers (Treatise on Fruit Trees), a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference in 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.