Book excerpt: Dating back to the 13th century, the print-making technique of ?nature printing? has an illustrious and informative history. The process, which uses the surfaces of natural objects like leaves to make prints of the actual objects, is how early books of medicinal plants were compiled. Through the centuries, nature printing evolved into a scientific process favored by botanists and biologists to reproduce plants and assemble catalogs of flora and fauna. The advent of photography also furthered the developments of how a natural object could be used to make a print.