In illuminated manuscripts of the Southern Netherlands between 1470 and 1480 there emerged a style of border with flowers plucked off and scattered on coloured backgrounds. Here they cast trompe l'oeil shadows as if they have just landed on the page and insects alight with wings that overlap the flowers and sometimes even the frames, enhancing the three dimensional illusion. These famous borders are especially, although not exclusively, associated with prayerbooks, breviaries and Books of Hours produced in the Flemish towns of Ghent and Bruges; and there has been a tendency to attribute their origins, like the finest miniatures, to one superlative master. In fact the impetus towards depicting realistic flowers can be traced through many stages of development - as to a lesser extent can the coloured backgrounds and the trompe l'oeil shadows - and one of the enigmas to be explored is whether their function was simply decorative, or whether they contained layers of meanings and associations.

The initial impulse for this research, my first love, was the flowers themselves and I approached the task originally with a simple desire to identify and classify them as a botanist would, noting which were common and which were rare, and the significance of their groupings and their variations. This made me a little impatient of the symbolic meanings attached to flowers, based as these often are on speculation and ancient quotations, and seemingly inimical to the dawning of scientific realism or the aesthetic appreciation of their forms, both of which are so evident in the late fifteenth century. But the flowers in manuscript borders can be studied from each of these angles and a long overdue appreciation of their significance is enhanced by the different possibilities they contain.

As with all crusades, the sense of mission was vital, but it could not encompass the distance to be travelled or the hazards along the way. This involved the analysis of the manuscripts themselves; of the documented miniaturists of the period such as Lieven van Lathem, Simon Marmion and Alexander Bening, alongside anonymous artists such as the Master of Mary of Burgundy and the Master of the Prayerbook of Maximilian who are known only by their styles; because it is through identification of their work that the manuscripts have been classified. (Although the repeated use of certain well-loved figure types, and whole scenes, often by different hands, has caused complications). The urge remains strong to attribute manuscripts to a named miniaturist, but a number of studies have confirmed that manuscript production was the result of complex and shifting associations between scribes, miniaturists and border decorators. Once the concept of a dominant miniaturist running a large workshop of assistants, apprentices, scribes and border decorators has given way to smaller - and perhaps more egalitarian - groupings, the question of who organised the production of a manuscript becomes wide open.

The very first scattered flower borders surrounded text, not miniature, pages; and in other manuscripts besides the London Hastings Hours the finest border masters appear to have concentrated their efforts on the text borders; until this seems, at times, to be a deliberate effort to avoid artistic competition with the miniaturist, perhaps on the part of a senior border master. There are a number of manuscripts to which Simon Marmion, or a follower, contributed miniatures, which also contain very fine plant studies, from a repertoire which can be identified as Marmionesque. But these flowers also appear in the text pages facing miniatures, and sometimes achieve even finer botanical detail in the golden half-margins that decorate subsidiary text pages. This is a further indication that border decoration, and flower painting, were considered to be art forms in their own right. It also makes clear that the contribution of Simon Marmion and his followers to Flemish manuscripts was something more complex than a series of inserted miniatures.

Indeed when attention is shifted from the miniatures, as mine was in studying the border decorations, an alternative approach suggests itself. Since the border decorations of luxury manuscripts produced in the Southern Netherlands between 1470 and 1490 went through more changes, experiments, novelties and variations than the miniatures did, it is reasonable to suggest that manuscripts might be better classified, dated and linked together by what is usually termed their secondary decoration. This too has its dangers, if one seeks too hard to disassociate Lieven van Lathem or the Master of Mary of Burgundy from the border motifs which have been attributed to them; or wishes too passionately to prove that Simon Marmion's contributions to Flemish manuscripts rested in the hands of his associates who were border decorators, and whose presence in the Southern Netherlands can be traced in the recurrence of certain plants; one may overstate the case of the border masters. Suffice it to say, since this is merely the introduction, that my aim is to redress a previous imbalance sometimes created by an undue emphasis on miniaturists.