The works of Mary Delany (1700-1788) are a remarkable combination of art and science. Often mistaken for watercolors, they are actually carefully constructed paper collages, or "mosaics," as she called them.

The story begins when the artist was 72 years old; she noticed the resemblance between a geranium and a piece of red paper on her nightstand. This realization led Delany to cut out the petals with scissors and imitate them on paper.

The final result was so accurate that when her friend Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, saw Delany's paper artwork, she mistook it for a real flower. This spurred Delany to create more collages and hone her craft.

By cutting small pieces of paper and gluing them onto a solid black background, Delany was able to construct each part of a sample, sometimes using around 200 paper petals per flower.

She layered smaller pieces over larger ones to create shadows and depth, and sometimes highlighted parts with watercolors. The glue used to attach the pieces was probably egg white or flour and water.

Each piece includes the botanical and common names of the plants depicted, the date and place where they were made, and who donated the specimen.

Friends began sending Delany flowers and plants from all over the world to imitate on paper, and the botanist Joseph Banks sent flowers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Banks also frequented the Duchess of Portland's country house and saw Delany's works firsthand.

The pieces were so precise that he described the collages as the only imitations of nature he had ever seen from which one could "botanically describe any plant without the slightest fear of making a mistake."

Delany made nearly a thousand of these incredible works of art and science before his failing eyesight forced him to hang up his scissors in 1783, after ten years of dedication to his floral masterpieces.