A low, much-branched plant spreads across the page on thick, ribbed gray-green stems cut off at the base. Its leaves are stiff and needle-pointed, and flat clusters of tiny white flowers crown the branch tips. Along the bottom, small lettered details show single flowers and their parts, some enlarged, above the engraved name Echinophora spinosa. Ferdinand Bauer sketched plants like this one on John Sibthorp's journey through Greece and Turkey in 1786–1788, writing numbers on his pencil sketches to stand for colors, then spent six years in Oxford, from 1788 to 1794, turning them into watercolors.

Engraved and colored, the image became plate 265 of Flora Graeca, by Sibthorp and James Edward Smith, in a volume dated 1819. The Latin text records the plant on the road between Smyrna and Bursa and in the Peloponnese, and keys the details below, among them a female flower enlarged three times. Flora Graeca ran to ten volumes and took 54 years to produce, and only 25 copies were first printed. Oxford's herbaria note that much of the book's scientific value rests on Bauer's illustrations.

It is in the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati.