Drying and pressing flowers is a tradition that tells stories – 08/27/2023 – Equilíbrio

My compulsion to grow my garden expressively and vividly comes from my grandmother Marion, who always made room for huge bouquets of roses and zinnias that echoed the colors of the Fiesta ceramics on her pantry shelves. But she also left me a legacy of appreciation for dried and pressed plants, which have a special kind of lasting beauty, however faded.

Two of her pressed flower paintings—flowers taken from her garden and artistically arranged on fabric, protected by glass—hang in my hall. Lately I’ve been feeling that these souvenirs from a spring many years ago are trying to convey something to me. Maybe it’s giving me an example of how to age gracefully, although I doubt that was Grandma’s intention.

She wanted to convey the spirit of the garden, honor its importance in her life, by immortalizing some of her beloved ephemeral flowers. Create a lasting linking message. She made it.

So it’s not surprising that I feel close to people who press flowers today, like Linda PJ Lipsen, author of a new manual on the technique, “Pressed Plants: Making a Herbarium.”

Lipsen, a botanist, learned to dry plants 30 years ago at an Oregon public college, helping to frame pressed specimens for the herbarium. Today she is curator of the Herbarium at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, founded in 1912.

Lipsen and institutions like the herbarium are part of a 500-year-old tradition of documenting the natural world using dried plants. For example, a comparison between specimens from the modern world and historical specimens can reveal a lot about changes in the geographic distribution of plants in a changing climate, or it can document the arrival of an invasive species.

For Lacie RZ Porta, another enthusiast, what made her want to press plants was the desire to preserve her wedding flowers. When the wedding weekend drew to a close, she panicked.

“I can’t throw these flowers away. I need them,” she remembers thinking. So she looked for a way to preserve the rite of passage that flowers embodied.

Shortly afterward, she took a year’s sabbatical from her job as a preschool teacher and rented a studio. In 2017 she founded Framed Florals, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, specializing in preserving bridal bouquets between double sheets of glass and selling dried floral creations.

For her and for Lipsen, there is no watertight dividing line between art and science. “Specimens that don’t work become cards,” Lipsen said, smiling.

Some of Porta’s creations include a formal acknowledgment of scientific techniques, although customers may not understand the reference. One of them asked why thin tape was added to the stem of a plant pressed onto a card, even though the stem was already glued to the card.

This is how, historically, specimens preserved in herbaria have been locked up, to make them more secure, especially those with thick or woody stems.

“Anyone unfamiliar with the history or tradition of desiccating plants might want to know why,” Porta said.

Whatever the ultimate goal, the creator of any finished pressing assumes the role of narrator of a story. Are you willing to join the ranks of these storytellers and surrender to the lure of desiccation?

Creative freedom versus scientific protocol

As similar as the processes used by Porta and Lipsen are, there are differences. The biggest one is artistic freedom versus scientific protocol.

In a herbarium, a framed specimen should bear the Latin name of the plant, the name of the person who collected it, the date it was collected and details of the place where it was found. The specimen must include all parts of the plant, arranged so that we can count its reproductive parts (for example, the pistils and stamens of a flower) or see other distinguishing features, such as its root system.

The main objective is not beauty, but accuracy as a reference material. Yet, as Lipsen pointed out, master herbalists manage to incorporate science as well as art into their framed dried plants.

There are no plant names in my grandmother’s pictures, but I recognize lilies of the valley, pansies, and roses (thorns and all). Twenty years ago I added 14 vintage paintings of dried seaweed — or, botanically speaking, macroalgae, one of Lipsen’s specialties — to my walls. Each of them had a Latin name and was numbered, as if it were part of a series, but the name of who collected them and the place were not informed.

Artisans like Porta like to take creative liberties—for example, removing the very thick center of a rose or coneflower, which conserves moisture and doesn’t flatten easily, and instead drying just the petals, arranging them to form a draw.

“To do their artwork, they often have to separate the plant into its parts and then practically put it together like a jigsaw puzzle, and we have to try to conserve everything,” Lipsen said. “That’s why our jobs don’t always look so pretty.”

Another important difference: the ethical issues involved when sampling in the field do not come into play when the plants come from a flower plantation or your own garden. These issues include obtaining permission to collect the samples and considerations for minimizing the effect of collection on a specific plant population.

When Lipsen goes out to collect specimens, she takes plastic bags with airtight seals (one for each specimen, so parts of different plants don’t get mixed up). Porta’s most used tool is a little notebook closed with rubber bands, like a miniature press, which she puts under something heavy when she gets home.

Next step: the press

In my grandmother’s house there was a wooden contraption that preserved the plants she collected between layers of paper and cardboard and was closed with long screws and washers. Other plants began their transition to eternal life tucked between the pages of a Yellow Pages-type phone book—a mass of tissue paper that any plant conservator today would envy.

Porta and Lipsen dehydrate their plants in simple presses, with layers of corrugated cardboard, which ensures ventilation, and newspaper sheets, for better moisture absorption. The Door Press is homemade with two sheets of plywood, long screws and wing nuts to secure the plants well. Lipsen’s comes from a herbalist supply store, has lattice top and bottom linings, and straps with locking clasps.

One thing everyone agrees on: avoid using glossy paper, which is less absorbent, and any paper with colored ink, which can discolor the pressed plant.

Porta does not use newsprint in the layer immediately adjacent to the plants; prefers to use clear craft paper or other plain paper. For Lipsen, the ideal option for the layer that touches the specimens is blotting paper, which can be reused.

But professional botanists who collect thousands of specimens and need enough paper to fill many presses agree on one point: newsprint is almost universally available and usually costs nothing.

So Lipsen uses it, but he has a caveat: when you’re working with very sticky plants, it might not work. In these cases, she surrounds the plants with parchment paper.

“We have bulbs and algae where you can read the newspaper they were pressed with,” she said. “It’s super funny when you see it.”

When Porta puts plants through the press, she gently manipulates them “to be in a more gestural position, to remind us of nature.” This may involve bending some stems, “to give organic movement”. But once they are dehydrated, it is not possible to manipulate the plants in the slightest.

Lipsen, who needs to preserve every part of the plant, is a little more brutal.

Plants, which are filled with water, have a swelling pressure which stiffens them. So, Lipsen said, “When I put them in the press I literally lean on it and hear a squishing sound. Then I open the press to see if there’s anything I want to rearrange. Then I close it again and let it sit. and go through a little bit of cell death.”

After a day or two, when the plants are more pliable, she opens the press for a final adjustment to ensure every important plant part is clearly exposed.

Then the drying process begins.

This is preferably done in a warm, well-ventilated space. Both Lipsen and Porta periodically replace any papers that appear to have gotten wet during the process. Porta tells brides the whole process takes at least a month. Lipsen, who dries each specimen on a separate sheet in a room at 23 to 26 degrees with a fan on, predicts that most will be dehydrated within a week.

When it comes time to frame the plants, avoid using Super Bonder-like glues or glue guns, Porta said: Use “just a miniscule amount of any basic, non-toxic glue.”

Lipsen uses a Herbarium Supply Company PVC glue that becomes transparent once it dries.

Whatever you use, be warned: the wrong glue can produce unwanted results, especially with large sheets.

A plant’s cells and even the paper it’s glued to will continue to react to changes in humidity over time. “If the glue doesn’t stretch, it will stretch the specimen until it tears,” Lipsen said, something that can be seen in very old pressed blueprints.

Someone who loved my grandmother Marion before me seems to have known of her weakness for dried flowers. One of more than 130 letters from her fiancé, Harold Kinney, who served in France during World War I, contained a dried plant.

“I am sending you a flower that I plucked in a churchyard a few days ago,” he wrote in his formal cursive to the woman he called Snooks on February 17, 1918. “The church and the graves were all destroyed by mortars. This flower was growing in the moss amidst the rubble in February.”

Kinney was killed that year, just before the end of the war. But letters from him endured, along with that flower pressed between leaves, and were passed on to keep that moment alive.

Translated by Clara Allain