The Duchess of Beaufort's Flowers pt4

Finally my room is back to what it was and this time  we have an Aloe arborescens in flower as our subject. The text has states:

There are over a dozen pictures in the manuscripts of the plant, *Aloe. The one illustrated here was painted by Frankcom who chose to paint the flowering specimens. Those painted by Kychicus were representative of the plants grown from seed which came from the Cape of Good Hope, some still in seedling form. 

Wild Aloes are shrubby xerophytes which are able to adapt themselves to dry conditions by thickening their leaves to hold reserves of water as does the cactus. The leaves form a rosette around the stem out of which the flowers grow, bur some have a stalk or trunk** which can reach a height of twenty or thirty feet in their native country. Those the Duchess grew may have come from South Africa, but at a later date they were imported from Abyssinia and Madagascar, where it is said the juice of tree aloes is used medicinally as a purgative.

It is popular as a house plant as the rosettes of thick fleshy leaves are very varied, often with a triangular section and prickles on the margin which may be crowded or few, green white or yellow. The leaves may have white patches or stripes. The flowering stems may be branched and the flowers can vary from a drab olive green and yellow to a bright pinkish orange***. They are mostly They are mostly tubular and clustered rather like a small red hot poker (Kniphofia). The one depicted by Frankcom has flowers with a green tip to the orange incurving perianth. Frankom describes it in the index as having a stalk below the rosette, leaves encircling the stem, plain not spotted, and states that he painted it in 1703 and it came from Africa. It comes early in his book so perhaps it was one of his first paintings hence his more than usually detailed note.

Gordon Rowley writes in Bradleya that the notes to this were confused with an Agave, with is massive terminal flower spike in contrast to the more regular annual flowering of Aloes.

Incidentally I'm not sure who the Frankcom mentioned as artist in this could be. A search brings up a watchmaker and engraver of the same name but not an artist.

* Rowley logs this as ten instances of 7 different species.

** These tree Aloes are now treated as a separate species, Aloidendron. Indeed, looking at the list on Wiki, they do indeed, come from South Africa, Arabia and parts of east Africa. 

*** Aloe flowers range from yellow and orange to pink and a brickish red, with albiflora a rare outlier with white flowers. They all have green tips to the flowers, which remain straight rather than in Gasteria which is allied to them, but who's flowers are bent like a stomach and remain in a line unlike Aloes whose flowers are shrubby and branching.