This series is a meditation on presence, absence, and the records left, using the herbarium as a medium. It plays with the questions of what is collected and preserved, what data is recorded, and how textual and visual information is presented.

 

A herbarium is a collection of dried plant specimens, usually mounted on sheets of paper and systematically arranged for reference. The recorded data accompanying a specimen usually includes the botanical identification of the plant and collection date and location. While there are scientific standards for mounting and presenting dried plants and supplementing information on paper today, ways of doing so have never been static throughout history. For example, decorative elements—such as urns and ribbons—were prominently used in several early modern European collections for aesthetic purposes.

 

Taking particular inspiration from these decorations, this series emphasizes the aesthetics and creativity in historical collections to rethink what counts as a herbarium. Can a herbarium collect non-plants, such as vases and baskets for containing plants? Can a herbarium preserve plant colorants by extracting them as dyes for the papers? What systems can be used to record and visually arrange the data? Is this series still a herbarium when the plants themselves are not identified?

 

 

​

Further Readings on Historical Herbaria

• Carine, Mark, ed. The Collectors: Creating Hans Sloane’s Extraordinary Herbarium. London: The Natural History Museum, 2020.

• Flannery, Maura C. “Herbarium World.” https://herbariumworld.wordpress.com/.

• ———. In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023.

• Fleischer, Alette. “Leaves on the Loose: The Changing Nature of Archiving Plants and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 6, no. 1 (2017): 117–35. https://doi.org/10.5840/jems2017616.

• Offerhaus, Aleida, Emma de Haas, Henk Porck, Adriaan Kardinaal, Renske Ek, Omar Pokorni, and Tinde van Andel. “The Zierikzee Herbarium: Contents and Origins of an Enigmatic 18th Century Herbarium.” Blumea: Biodiversity, Evolution and Biogeography of Plants 66, no. 1 (2021): 1–52. https://doi.org/10.3767/blumea.2021.66.01.01.

• Thiers, Barbara M. Herbarium: The Quest to Preserve & Classify the World’s Plants. Portland: Timber Press, 2020.

• Thijsse, Gerard. “‘Everlasting Gardens’: Origin, Spread and Purpose of the First Herbaria.” In The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600–1600, edited by Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel, and Linda IJpelaar, 72–107. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61939.

• “Zierikzee Herbarium.” https://collectie.stadhuismuseum.nl/Herbarium/nl/Herbarium-dutch.html.