Helen Humphreys

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.

Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium

Field Study

taylor miles hopkins

Blue is the colour least found in nature, but it also seems to be the colour that remains most itself after death.

A stag in many traditions is the link between this world and the next, is the symbol of the "thin place." where the membrane of reality is at its most porous.

Perhaps this is because the flower head, when viewed close up, is abstract, and in making something abstract, there is little room for anything that does not feel true.

And yet, the flowers still take up their space, still resemble themselves, and I can feel their enduring presence, whereas I am starting to feel like I am the fleeting, temporary thing, that my human life is so brief in comparison to the genetic continuance of this gentian. Or this violet. I feel like a small, flickering flame, stuttering along the rows of file cabinets, barely here at all. 

This is not something I had anticipated feeling because I had been thinking at the start of this project of how so many plants and animals have been disappearing from our world. I had been thinking of nature as fragile, but now it seems that although humans have the capacity to destroy so much of the natural world, they might actually be one of the most fragile organisms and have the least resilience.

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