Albrecht Meyer

Meyer collaborated with the painter Heinricus Füllmaurer and the engraver Veit Rudolph Speckle (d.12 December 1550 Straßburg) in producing the woodcuts for the book, which, unusually for its time, named the contributing artists and included their portraits.

Fuchs, whose herbal had been inspired by Brunfels's work "Herbarum vivae imagines" which had appeared twelve years earlier, praised the illustrations as having been carried out with 'great diligence and artifice', and went on to state that 'shading and other less crucial things with which painters sometimes strive for artistic glory' had been shunned in order to make the images truer to nature.

The remarkably detailed woodcuts include the first published images of over 100 new plants from the Americas, such as pumpkin, marigold, maize, squash, chili peppers and tobacco – native to Mexico and brought to Europe from the New World.

Leonhart Fuchs was a child prodigy, matriculating from Erfurt University by the age of twelve, and then obtaining a degree in medicine at Ingolstadt.

The accuracy of the plates which show the flowers, roots and the plant habit, led to its being used as a reference work by European physicians and many famous herbaria of the sixteenth century, notably that of Dodoens.