Discovering an Herbarium
I felt a bit like a curator of years past while leading a crew into the surrounding forest last week. We carried ice cream pails, shovels, and journals, and while we weren't necessarily conducting a formal study of local flora in the field per se, I certainly enjoyed imagining as much. Perhaps heightened by the impending thunderstorm, the experience could even be described as exciting. For the participants, it was an opportunity to learn hands-on the process, in its entirety, of preparing plants for an herbarium. For me, it allowed me to leave the confines of the office to seek out specimens from a living, breathing world just a block outside the doors.
The Museum's herbarium collection consists of over 1,000 pressed plants and other flora. Of course, it's evolved to this over a seemingly long period of time--through changes in our overall collection, in staff, and most importantly changes in the habitats which they grow. It's been amazing to look back on what others have preserved in the past, and to take part in preserving more now. But overall we don't get much interest in the practice anymore.
That was much of why I chose to host workshops on plant pressing this summer. We spent a hot afternoon first in the classroom learning about proper collecting techniques, then went out into the soggy air to shovel out small plants as mosquitoes began to encroach on our area. Even as the sky rumbled and tornado alerts began to chime on our cell phones, the group's interest was still fixed on the plants. We sandwiched the plants between cardboard in the plant press, then left them to be returned to the next week.
Hour after hour, the plants dried until all the necessary moisture had drifted off through the newsprint sheets and corrugated cardboard enclosing them. The group reconvened the following week to release the plants from the press and create herbarium sheets. Having been such a fun process for the group, it's understandable how one could overlook how technical mounting a plant onto a sheet of paper can be.
We had created real museum-quality specimens, sure, but an herbarium item shouldn't simply speak to our finished work. The specimens first entered our sight as living organisms growing among their neighbors along the forest floor. And our experience with them began partly because we each had interest in preserving knowledge through the collecting of those plants.
That was much of why I chose to host workshops on plant pressing this summer. We spent a hot afternoon first in the classroom learning about proper collecting techniques, then went out into the soggy air to shovel out small plants as mosquitoes began to encroach on our area. Even as the sky rumbled and tornado alerts began to chime on our cell phones, the group's interest was still fixed on the plants. We sandwiched the plants between cardboard in the plant press, then left them to be returned to the next week.
Hour after hour, the plants dried until all the necessary moisture had drifted off through the newsprint sheets and corrugated cardboard enclosing them. The group reconvened the following week to release the plants from the press and create herbarium sheets. Having been such a fun process for the group, it's understandable how one could overlook how technical mounting a plant onto a sheet of paper can be.
We had created real museum-quality specimens, sure, but an herbarium item shouldn't simply speak to our finished work. The specimens first entered our sight as living organisms growing among their neighbors along the forest floor. And our experience with them began partly because we each had interest in preserving knowledge through the collecting of those plants.
