Helen Humphreys

In Field Study, award-winning author Helen Humphreys returns to her brilliant illustrated meditations, this time to delve into the lost world of herbarium collections to examine where and how we look to find the solace of nature in a declining natural world.

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.

Field Study quotes

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