Pretty Pressed Plants

I’ve started to get downright giddy in archives. My inner dork salivates over the prospect of wading through old manuscripts and ephemera and decoding illegible scrawls or watermarked pages—it would be so exciting to be the Sherlock Holmes of musty old documents!

So imagine my glee when I discovered the existence of herbaria, archives of preserved plants. I like to press flowers between the pages of the heavy art history volumes that clutter my room, but I didn’t realize that there were entire buildings devoted to housing these fragile works. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has 300,000 preserved specimens from all over the world. (Search the collection.) Many date from the mid-1800s, and were collected by people ranging from esteemed scientists to amateur gardening enthusiasts like me. I love the idea of studying a flower plucked a century ago by a lady in a floral bonnet who stooped to pluck some souvenirs on an afternoon stroll. Although less individual and sentimental than a found photograph or letter, somehow, these plants don’t feel any less intimate. My inner geek just started hyperventilating.  

The American Museum of Natural History's dizzying hall of biodiversity has some totally awesome preserved plants, too!