Big Plants on Little Sheets

During times like these, I enjoy imagining myself on a hot summer afternoon--sinking slowly into the shallows of a small, sandy pond. I grasp at water smartweed, with thick flower spikes covered in clusters of bubblegum pink, and carefully pull out the entire plant all the way down to the long rhizomes. I pack the smartweed away with various others to later press and add to the rest of the collection. 

I dream vicariously of such days merely through the notes that my friend Jan scrawled this past August. Yet on any day of the year, I'm privileged in having regular access to the herbarium where all our collected plants may be retrieved. It's there that each plant is stored in perpetuity--from small and delicate ephemerals to obtrusive sprawlers, shrubs, and even trees. But how do we get away with storing such an array of plant--including tree--material in a single cabinet?

Water smartweed is an adaptable plant which can thrive in aquatic areas
where water levels change throughout the seasons.

The answer comes in how we mount our plants. I've addressed, rather frequently, throughout previous months how my reliable team of collections volunteers has made significant progress in preparing and cataloging specimens for our herbarium. They spend a large portion of their time mounting flattened plants to standardized herbarium mounting paper that measures 11.5 by 16.5 inches. Because plants aren't designed to fit perfectly onto those sheets, my volunteers have to make some adjustments. 

First, tall or long plants can simply be folded along conspicuous points of their stems. Sometimes it only takes one fold to fit the entire plant within the border of the paper, but we occasionally contort the plant even more to fit it onto one sheet. We can likewise fold over or even cut off some parts of the leaf structure, depending on how many total leaves are present. Lastly, if a plant is too large to arrange the entire structure onto one sheet, we will divide the plant among multiple sheets. 

This water smartweed (Persicaria amphibia) was collected as one plant, but due
to its length we decided to divide it into three sections to fit on separate specimen sheets.

In this instance, each sheet will act as a part of a whole. We do not treat each sheet as an individual specimen or generate separate catalog numbers for each. For example, we handled the mounting of a water smartweed specimen by dividing the plant among three sheets. All three sheets were part of specimen number 2019.12.06, and discriminated from each other with the additional suffix of a, b, or c. This method has worked well with numerous large plants as we attempt to keep things organized at the Museum. 

Catalog records (carrying the specimen number shown here) can tell us more
about the entire specimen which this sheet is part of representing. The two other
sections of this plant are found on separate sheets.