nicknicknicknick reviewed Field Study by Helen Humphreys
Field Study
5 stars
1) "To do this, I have chosen to concentrate on the phenomenon of the herbarium. These libraries of dried plant specimens - some hundreds of years old - seem the perfect crucible in which to examine the intersection of human beings and the natural world through time. Each herbarium specimen is mounted on a sheet of paper with a label affixed by the collector, providing details of the plant and the location where it was found, but also including information about the person who preserved the plant. In this way the herbarium becomes a place, a landscape if you will, where the experience of people connecting with nature is revealed. I cannot think of another place where it is possible to look into the past and see the moment an orchid was plucked from the forest floor or a willow frond was cut from a branch. A visit to the …
1) "To do this, I have chosen to concentrate on the phenomenon of the herbarium. These libraries of dried plant specimens - some hundreds of years old - seem the perfect crucible in which to examine the intersection of human beings and the natural world through time. Each herbarium specimen is mounted on a sheet of paper with a label affixed by the collector, providing details of the plant and the location where it was found, but also including information about the person who preserved the plant. In this way the herbarium becomes a place, a landscape if you will, where the experience of people connecting with nature is revealed. I cannot think of another place where it is possible to look into the past and see the moment an orchid was plucked from the forest floor or a willow frond was cut from a branch. A visit to the herbarium is an exquisite kind of time travel. And by learning more about the intersection of people and nature in the past, I hope to gain some understanding of where we can go from here."
2) "If a lichen is to be a reliable witness to the years, it has to grow in a protected place that is itself allowed to be unchanging. Cemeteries and churches, caves and mineshafts are good environments for lichens and, subsequently, lichenologists. Roland Beschel regularly visited certain graveyards to monitor the lichens on the tombstones. He made excursions to the Arctic and Greenland as well, locations where there was little human interference with the landscape and where the lichens could flourish undisturbed."
3) "While I was working my way through the Fern files at herbarium, I had a recurring dream. In the dream, the dead people in my life were mingling with the living people and I could no longer tell which was which, who was alive and who was dead. It was as though I had forgotten this most fundamental distinction, and the dream was spent trying to sort out what was true and what was not. The ferns in the specimen cabinets are no longer alive, but they still look as if they are, and though they are brittle, this dryness is not an indicator as to when a particular fern perished. A fern picked a hundred years ago is in much the same state of preservation as a fern picked ten years ago. The herbarium is a catalogue of dead plants, but perhaps it also tells us, equally, about what it is to be alive - that the dead and the living not only share the same space but are, in fact, equal."
4) "Perhaps Wilhelm Suksdorf did not want anyone else to visit his Falcon Valley or Elk Ridge. He had a private relationship with Jackrabbit Gulch and Rice Creek and wanted to keep it that way. His non-scientific naming of locations was exasperating to the botanists who followed him, as was his desire to 'split' variations of the same plant into different species. But naming somewhere because of what you have encountered there makes more sense than any other way of naming and is a way to tie oneself to place. It becomes an acknowledgement of both the Earth's creatures and one human's individual experience. And I, for one, would love to visit Suksdorf's Butterfly Lake, wherever it is."
5) "On this very day, May 3, in 1901, John B. Flett was collecting willows to represent the flora of Washington in the Smithsonian herbarium. He cut a piece of heartleaf willow (Salix cordata) in Tacoma, noting that he found it 'Growing in pools which dry up.' He also collected a specimen of Pacific willow (Salix lasiandra) that was seven to nine feet high and found growing in water. He notes on the bottom of the label that the willow was 'frequented by honey bees!!!' I like his three exclamation points, which still show, all these years later, his excitement. I like it all the more when I find out that he was forty-two when he penciled in those jubilant exclamation points."
6) "What I have learned from drawing flowers is that each one, while subscribing to a pattern, is also an individual, and when I am drawing it, I have to pay attention to the character of each flower and present that in the finished piece. And, just as I am drawn more to the character of some people, I also prefer the character of particular flowers, and in Queen Anne's lace, I prefer there to be space between the blooms and the umbels, for the head of the flower to have an open appearance, the 'lace' loose enough to see through to the field grasses below."
7) "While animals and plants are still classified using a version of the Linnaean system I prefer a more interconnected way to look at plants and animals, and in my own practice of thinking about, and drawing, the natural world, I am trying to make connections - not so much a way of delineating a direct line between one thing and another, something more subtle than that: colours that line up, a way of movement that resembles another way of movement, a shape that crosses from one species to another. And when I think of field guides, I think of making small guides to both the tangible and the ephemeral, such as a field guide to memory that shows the angle of the rush after the blackbird has lifted, that shows the strew of apple blossom after the storm has passed, the closed head of a flower after the rain has ceased."
8) "These are the places where the various collectors discovered their violets: 'Storm stricken deciduous woodland' 'Luxuriant in rich grass land' 'Flowering near the water; fruiting on sunny cliffs' 'Damp woods' 'edges of granite ledge' 'Wooded hillside' 'Rocky woods' 'Common in mossy swards' 'border of salt meadow.' 'Neglected mountain pasture' The range of habitat shows the hardy, adaptable nature of the plant and I like to picture all of these locales stamped with a bright coin of blue or yellow violet."
9) "Driving along the highway that borders the marsh near the city, I suddenly see how the marsh is the hinge between lake and land, where blackbirds sway on rushes, and herons rise on stiffened wings. Where water is a form of darkness, and the choir of wild iris sings with meadowsweet and willow. It is neither solid ground, nor entirely melt, but shifts its state to what is found, matching creature and season. Giving us, too, relief from absolutes, a fate where we can dream ourselves as sway or rise, or earthly song."