Press Flowers for “Quarantine Herbarium”
From herbariums, fascinating time capsules are obtained. There is probably a room in a museum or university near you with pages and pages of old, large sheets of paper, each with a dried, whole plant neatly glued to it. These are the plant equivalents of dinosaur bones or stuffed animals: once living specimens, preserved for the future, with all their details intact, because they are not drawings or prints, but the plants themselves.
If you take daily walks , like me, you probably notice something that you have never done before, or pay extra attention to it. I know the neighbor’s pink dogwoods have recently started blooming near me, garlic mustard is starting to take up the corner of my backyard (it’s aggressive, I really have to pull it out), and my daughter’s favorite dandelions have been fully blooming for weeks now.
I don’t have the strength to write a lot, but I photographed what I see. And now that I know about the quarantine herbarium, I can start clicking on some plants to create a nature scrapbook made from real pieces of nature.
Historian Elaine Ayers has created a collaborative quarantine herbarium project and the contributions are open to everyone. Click on your own samples, scan or photograph them and email them to add them to your collection. (Instructions are here .)
Regardless of whether you are participating in the project or not, you can always create a herbarium for yourself as a kind of time capsule of what you have experienced this season. A herbarium specimen usually includes a record of when and where the plant was harvested; you can add as many additional details as you like. It is also not necessary to stick to wild individuals. Houseplants count as well, and I noticed a photograph of freshly harvested garden asparagus in the collection with the note that “these specimens will be consumed after documentation.”
Like maps and kid-friendly time capsules , a herbarium can be a way to connect with your surroundings and live a little in the present moment, consciously creating a record that you can return to in the future.