Richard Owen knew that he was making a place for a museum of natural history in all of its guises, and plants are part of natural history which, I think, kind of makes the building, because it's the one place in this building where plants are the element of decoration as opposed to just being the background for animals. We don't really know very much about the ceiling because most of the documentation about it has either been lost or never existed. We don't know who decided what plants to put here, we don't know why the plants were chosen to put on the ceiling, so it's a great mystery. Particularly puzzling are these unlabelled panels, known as the archaic panels. I would come into the museum early in the morning and I would look up at the ceiling with binoculars. I think people who came in thought I was a little bit crazy. Some of the archaic panels are really easy to identify their common garden plants, a lily, for example, but some of them are a bit more difficult, and there are some that really stumped me, I just couldn't figure out what they were. And the other thing we never knew was where these images had come from. And I was leafing through a book called Plantae Asiaticae Rariores, which was published in the 1830s by Nathaniel Wallich, and I came across one and I thought, "That's it, that's the plant I can't figure out what it was," and I realised that many of the images on the ceiling had actually been copied from this particular book.


理查德·欧文知道他要建造的是一座全面展现自然历史的博物馆，而植物是自然历史的一部分，正是它使得这幢建筑变得完整。因为在此处，植物成了装饰的核心，而不仅仅是为动物充当背景。我们对大厅天花板知之甚少，因为关于天花板的大多记载文件，已经轶失或者并不存在，是谁选定画中植物的种类。为何要用这些植物来装饰天花板，我们全都不得而知。这是一个宏大的谜团，尤其令人费解的是这些没有标签的镶板，它们被称为"古镶板"。我会在清早来到博物馆，用双目望远镜观看天花板。我想走进来的人会觉得我是个疯子，一部分"古镶板"很容易鉴别，它们是普通的花园植物，比如说百合，但另一些则不易鉴别。其中一些确实难住了我，我无法辨别出它们是什么植物，这些图画的来源，我们也无从得知。我翻阅纳萨尼尔·瓦立池19世纪30年代出版的，《亚洲珍稀植物》时看到了一株植物，想到"就是它，这就是我无法辨认的植物"。而后我发现很多天花板上的图片，就是临摹这本书而来的。