Durer's Turf (Das Grosse Rasenstuck, 1503)

I am reading Richard Mabey's book on Weeds, and I particularly liked his commentary on this painting. I happen to have this painting on my pinboard - which is a display of art cards which I change from time to time - my art gallery - I bought this one in an art gallery in Vienna - but you could only buy it if you bought a calendar - so I bought the calendar. (Husband tutted at wife's extravagance.)

"To gaze at Albrecht Durer's extraordinary painting Large Piece of Turf is to glimpse an imagination piercing through the artistic conventions and cultural assumptions of its time and projecting itself forward three centuries. This is painting's discovery of ecology. This is any corner of any waste patch of land in the early twenty-first century, or at any time. This is a clump of weeds looked at with such reverent attention that they might have been the flowers of Elysium.
"The structure of the painting couldn't be simpler. It is the structure of vegetation itself, as if Durer had stuck a spade at random in the ground and used the slab of turf he lifted as his frame. In the foreground are three rosettes of greater plantain, a weed that has so closely dogged human trackways across the globe that it was also known as Waybread and Traveller's foot. They're surrounded by wisps of meadow-grass. Two dandelion heads, some way past flowering but still topped with yellow, lean leftwards. At the the very rear of the painting - and its only concession to the less than commonplace - a few leaflets of burnet-saxifrage are just visible through the mesh of grass leaves. You observe this community of plants not from above, or any other conventionally privileged viewpoint, but from below. The bottom quarter of the picture is almost entirely devoted to the mottled patch of earth in which the weeds are visibly rooted...[bad sentence] It is a visually exquisite and scientifically correct composition. What you are looking at is a miniature ecosystem in which every component, from the damp mud at the base to the seeds on the point of flight, is connected....
"No one was to take such an intensely grounded view of mundane vegetation again until the early nineteenth century..."