The term
herbarium means what the 18th century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus called an herbarium vivum: a collection
of plants or plants or plant parts that are picked in the wild or garden, pressed and dried, and then mounted for permanent display and reference.
The activities involved in creating a herbarium is- searching for, identifying, collecting, pressing and drying plants.
A pocket knife or a pair of pruning clippers would be a useful tool to cut off shoots or branches. Take a garden trowel for digging up roots or underground stems. Some plastic bags, a notebook and a pencil are a sure carry along. This is all you need for an essential gear. Wearing gloves would be a cautious collectors approach. A small plant press can be carried along on field trips to begin pressing immediately after
specimens are cleaned and wiped dry. Ideally, an herbarium sheet would exhibit, intact, every significant part of a collected
Specimen. Right at the gathering site, make notebook entries of the date, the place , the kind of habitat, specific growing conditions and other observations height, smell, color, overall shape of tree and bark etc. .
Neatly glue or tape each specimen to a sheet of heavy white paper or cardboard. Use a clear drying paste or glue or transparent tape. While arranging specimens on the herbarium sheet, stick a label at the lower right-hand corner. Label should give scientific name, common name or names, date and place of collection, and any other significant information from the field notes. The special circumstances of when, where and how the plant was collected are very important. A specialist will be able to identify the specimen many years later, but only the collector can relate its “personal history’- a good reason fro the collector to sign the label proudly with his or her name.
Clear plastic wrap can be used to protect mounted specimens, Store them in any convenient manner – for example, laid flat in drawers – so long as they are protected against crushing and bending. And some system of arranging is a must, whether by scientific classification, by environment or habitat, or by another logical scheme, such as alphabetical order. It will make the collection easily accessible and all the more enjoyable.
Photographs can effectively complement, but not replace the herbarium as a research and reference tool. They are especially useful for documenting the living plant – its colors, its environment and its seasonal transformations. The two techniques- photography and herbarium vivum, work together wonderfully. Seeing a page of skillfully mounted specimens, followed by a page of color pictures of the plant, would make Linnaeus himself turn green with envy.