secondhand books & pressed flowers
I quite like secondhand books. there is the fact of being a secondhand-enjoyer as a rule, for the reduce-reuse-recycle aspect, and the lower price tag aspect as well. but Books, though, have another dimension; books are sometimes marked by use. Annotations, dog-ears, bookmarks, what-have-you. some are delightful insights. some are vaguely comedic insights into the previous owner ... such as secondhand textbooks which only have annotations for the first few chapters, a testament to its student-owner giving up on reading it partway through the semester. sometimes, the bookmark is a 50$ note, though I have yet to be so lucky.
I think I got a better remnant, though, picking up a secondhand botany book, R. Philips' Wild Flowers of Britain, within which its previous owner had pressed flowers (matched to the relevant pages, of course) ...!
above: common vetch, found pressed between the pages describing vetches
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above, left to right, pressed on respective pages: yellow rattle, shining cranesbill, ragwort
for me, part of the point of a secondhand book is this previous-use, its mini-history. Sure, it's nice to get a book for 1/5 of the price, but a shiny new book would not have flowers pressed in it.
The previous owner left only the pressed flowers, no name, no annotations. the collection is incomplete by a long shot, but the fact it exists at all is what stirs the soul. This book was someone's, and they left their mark, and now it's mine, mine to care for ... mine to continue pressing flowers in, maybe? I feel almost a responsibility to do so, in respect to whoever-this-was who last possessed the book.
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perhaps my motivation here is also that I've wanted to press plants for a while now. Plant-pressing is just simply really really cool.
A few years past now, I visited a tiny herbarium at the university where I did my undergrad. the place was like a closet hunched in the corner of the botanic garden, barely enough space for a handful of students and botanists. humble, considering the importance of herbariums.
Herbariums are collections of plants, usually pressed (exsiccata). the dried samples preserve important features, like leaf shape, size, growth patterns, flowers, roots, so on. the techniques are centuries old. and, remarkably, these dried plants contain DNA that can be analysed with modern techniques. so, centuries before any understanding of DNA even existing, botanists were preserving the plant genetic record. This is an absolute treasure-trove. Through the herbariums we can gain an extraordinarily detailed picture of the forests, grasslands, coasts, pastures, of centuries ago. Learning this is what made me think I must give this plant-pressing a try, which I didn't, not yet.
I flip through the book and think, well, maybe now's the time. I've inherited someone else's nascent exsiccatum, should I not nurture its growth?
...
thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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