Field Study
Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning and beloved author Helen Humphreys discovers her local herbarium and realizes we need to look for beauty in whatever nature we have left — no matter how diminished
Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that are still with us and those that are lost. Over the course of a year, Humphreys considers life and loss and the importance of finding solace in nature.
Illustrated throughout with images of herbarium specimens, Humphreys’s own botanical drawings, and archival photographs, this will be the perfect gift for Humphreys’s many fans, nature enthusiasts, and for all who loved Birds Art Life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"A visit to the herbarium is an exquisite kind of time travel," writes poet and novelist Humphreys (Rabbit Foot Bill) in this delightful mix of memoir and field study. Despite climate change and habitat loss, Humphreys suggests, "there is still a profound need within human beings to connect to the natural world," and, accordingly, she spent a year studying "the phenomenon of the herbarium." This primarily included the "catalogue of dead plants" at Canada's Fowler Herbarium, as well as the herbarium collections of Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau, who gathered more than 900 specimens. Humphreys offers impressive mini-biographies of figures who contributed to botany, such as Jack Gillett, a botanist who enjoyed skinny-dipping; W.G. Dore, a grass specialist who wrote "detailed and vivid" descriptions of the subjects of his studies; Lulie Crawford, who found the sample of dog violet now at Fowler; and the Indigenous people who cataloged and preserved flora before the herbarium. In beautiful prose, Humphreys describes her experience acquainting herself with plants: "In the virtual forest... I now find myself in a patch of violets that stretches on and on, file after file." Readers who appreciated Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders will revel in these gorgeous explorations.
