For centuries, people have pressed plants between pages ~ not only to preserve their beauty, but to record the world around them. The practice first took root in 16th Century Italy, where physician and botanist Luca Ghini began mounting dried specimens onto paper for teaching and and study. Unlike fragile live plants, these pressed flowers could travel across borders, allowing scholars to compare discoveries and build the foundations of modern botany. What began as a scientific tool spread quickly across Europe… students carried them, explorers tucked them in trunks beside maps and journals, and apothecaries kept them as guides to their remedies. A pressed flower could outlast its living counterpart, becoming evidence of discovery in a world still being named.
Over time the herbarium slipped quietly out of the lecture hall and into everyday life. Gardeners pressed them for design, poets and lovers tucked them into books, and collectors built living archives that traced the movement of plants across continents, the history of medicine, and even the changing climate. Today, the world’s great universities and museums hold millions of specimens, some pressed hundreds of years ago and still perfectly intact. Yet herbariums have always carried something more personal as well ~ keepsakes of gardens past, reminders of walks in the woods, or records of flowers once given and received. Each specimen is both history and story, a preserved moment of nature held in time ~ the very essence of what inspires antique pressed flowers and modern Herbarium art alike.
The Herbariums you see here continue that tradition - honoring both the legacy of discovery and the quiet, timeless beauty of the plants themselves.