The 46 States of America & Each State Flower

Close-up of the Flying Donkey map game

Yesterday I had a lot of fun browsing through the Osher Map Library. The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, at the University of Southern Maine has a wonderful collection of vintage maps. Many of which you can view online.

There are lots of curiosities in the collection, including the Flying Donkey Game, Yaggy's Nature in Descending Order visualization and the Our National Bouquet map.
 

Unfortunately the Osher Map Library's interactive Our National Bouquet map doesn't include the map key. This means that you only guess each state's flower from its hand-drawn picture. Alternatively you can refer to my Annotated Our National Bouquet map. If you click on a state on my version of the map you can discover the actual name of the state flower.

The map was originally published by the United States Flower Company in 1911. The map shows 46 states (in 1911, Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico were still territories, and Hawaii didn't become a state until 1959). Interestingly many of the state flowers have changed since 1911. For example the state flower of North Carolina is no longer tobacco. Who knows why tobacco North Carolina now wants to be associated more with the flowering dogwood than with the tobacco plant?

I created my annotated version of the map using the iiif manifest of the map from the Osher Map Library. To create the annotations for my map I used my own Leaflet-IIIF-GeoJSON wizard, which can be used to view and add annotations to any IIIF image using the popular Leaflet mapping library.