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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.