I. A herbarium is a botanical archive, a space for taxonomy and preservation, conserving characteristics and potential uses of plants for future generations. A beautiful object with beautiful illustrations, in which flora specimens are pressed with precision and care—almost art like.
I read tips and procedures for creating one:
collection – collect only healthy plants, preferably in dry weather. Ideally, have the entire plant including the root, if possible, or at least all typical features such as leaves, flowers, and fruit
pressing – carefully arrange the plants so the leaves do not overlap and place them between absorbent paper (newspapers, old books). Weigh down the paper with heavy objects
drying – the paper must be changed more frequently at first to prevent the plant from developing mold. Drying takes 1 to 2 weeks
adjusting – attach the dried plant to a stiff cardboard (e.g., using thin paper strips) and add labels
It is important, I understand, to preserve the whole plant—healthy, complete, exemplary, with no reference to others, without context. Do not allow mold to form and do not omit labels.
II. An excerpt from an online herbarium; I’m randomly opening the entry for Lady’s Mantle. I don’t know what “palmate lobed” or “vernation” means, but I’m not giving up:
LADY’S MANTLE
Rosaceae (Alchemilla vulgaris L. sp. aggr.)
A perennial herb with a short rhizome and a basal rosette of leaves, glabrous to densely hairy (with varying degrees of hairiness on different parts of the plant). The stems are leafy, ascending to erect, arising from the rhizome on the side of the leaf rosette, 5–50 cm tall. Basal leaves are petiolate, with a stiff, round to sub-reniform, light, dark, or gray-green blade, palmate-lobed to palmate-divided, with 5–11 lobes, serrate to toothed. The leaf margins are ciliate. The blades are flat or longitudinally wrinkled between the palmate veins. The inflorescence is abundant, terminal, composed of clusters. The flowers are small, 3–5 mm in diameter, stalked, four-parted (excluding the pistil), yellow-green to ± green, and corolla-less. On the circumference of the cup-shaped, hollow calyx are 4 sepals, alternating with 4 larger, glabrous, ciliate to densely hairy calyx lobes (auricles). There are 4 stamens, attached by filaments outside a glandular ring located at the circumference of the calyx mouth. The ovary is superior, consisting of a single carpel, located at the base of the calyx, with a nearly inferior style and a capitate stigma. The fruit is an achene, the entire fruit or ± the lower part enclosed within the dried calyx.
III. What is it like to be a dry, mold-free, perfectly pressed, resilient, hairy Lady’s Mantle, pinned or drawn in a herbarium? A labeled object, the othered, differentiated one, with every centimeter, diameter, and lobe measured and described—and all in a language that isn’t my own? What is it like to be a butterfly pinned in a museum display case? Here it lies—dead, well-described (!) and preserved.
I may not be a Lady’s Mantle in a herbarium nor a butterfly in a display case, but somehow those feelings are familiar to me.
IV. If I were to be a specimen in a herbarium, I want the herbarium to say things like: she sat on the couch eating potato chips, showered, then drove her car back and forth. I want my entry to be moist; that speaks to me more than centimeters, diameters, and lobes. I’d rather have my body eaten by mold than have it—completely, without any connection to others and without context for future generations—become a dried up specimen.
V. If I were to write a moist herbarium entry about the relationships and contexts of recent days in alanguage that is my own, it might look like this, or it might look completely different:
I’m calling Eva from the lakeshore to ask about the exhibition; she says, Oh, I’d like that too, to lie bythe lake—lying by the lake is so nice
I’m peeing with the door open; no one’s home. Or maybe someone is, we are getting used to each other.
Houseplants, sun, water, fertilizer. Don’t water me so much—water me more!
Mojmír recounts a recipe for vegetable soup and homemade fertilizer in the gallery kitchen; you canuse it on houseplants, you know. Denisa says, come visit us at Bříza and we’ll show it to you there; I want to fill my car tank with nature’s liquid oil bodies right away and head over to them, but I still have other things to do.
We pull the last radishes from the parched soil of my garden and then Karina’s; some are already woody—is it the drought, or are we pulling them out too late?
Sráč Sam pours water into a ceramic object that resembles an almond, though it might not be an almond at all; I’d like to hold that almond and hug it, though I can’t understand the tenderness I feel towards it. Sam says—the water will color it; it will be the same but different. Eva writes: a vessel that flows and speaks. Is that me?
Berounka is a peaceful river—birches, willows, frogs, tramps, and kayakers—but I come from river Danube, the pull of a strong current, poplars, pebbles, and mud; when I swim in Berounka, I’m not scared enough.
Luba and Lily are dealing with the water at the cottage; is the water also dealing with Luba and Lily?
Coffee in a mug on the table and in my mouth and in my stomach and in my blood and so on; I spilled some but not much; I’ll wipe it up later.
—Text by Zuzana Jakalová
