Then Goethe went on his famous journey to Italy which was to bear such significant fruit for his inner life, both in art and in science. At Michaelmas, 1786, he reports from his visit to the botanical garden in Padua that ‘the thought becomes more and more living that it may be possible out of one form to develop all plant forms’. At this moment Goethe felt so near to the basic conception of the plant for which he was seeking, that he already christened it with a special name. The term he coined for it is Urpflanze, literally rendered archetypal plant, or ur-plant, as we propose quite simply to call it.⁶