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

It was the rich tropical and sub-tropical vegetation in the botanical
gardens in Palermo that helped Goethe to his decisive observations. The
peculiar nature of the warmer regions of the earth enables the spirit
to reveal itself more intensively than is possible in the temperate
zone. Thus in tropical vegetation many things come before the eye which
otherwise remain undisclosed, and then can be detected only through an
effort of active thought. From this point of view, tropical vegetation
is 'abnormal' in the same sense as was the proliferated rose which
confirmed for Goethe's physical perception that inner law of
plant-growth which had already become clear to his mind.

During his sojourn in Palermo in the spring of 1787 Goethe writes in
his notebook: 'There must be one (ur-plant): how otherwise could we
recognize this or that formation to be a plant unless they were all
formed after one pattern?' Soon after this, he writes in a letter to
the poet Herder, one of his friends in Weimar:

'Further, I must confide to you that I am quite close to the secret of
plant creation, and that it is the simplest thing imaginable. The
ur-plant will be the strangest creature in the world, for which nature
herself should envy me. With this model and the key to it one will be
able to invent plants ad infinitum; they would be consistent; that is
to say, though non-existing, they would be capable of existing, being
no shades or semblances of the painter or poet, but possessing truth
and necessity. The same law will be capable of extension to all living