The practice of preserving plants by pressing them goes back hundreds of years. I began playing with pressing this spring and am now making cards with the results, which come from our garden.
It’s a sweet little hobby. Learning that American poet Emily Dickinson also preserved plants this way and retained them in an herbarium, a volume of her pressed flowers, was a pretty delightful surprise.
Harvard University retains this volume, which is now too fragile for even the scholars to touch. But the university has created an online archive of the herbarium, which is an amazing and completely different record or her work.
It’s worth a look. The delicate flowers and blossoms preserved across the centuries, I find quite touching.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 