Pressed Plants: Making a Herbarium

Pressed Plants is a comprehensive beginner friendly guide with tutorials for getting started preserving and cataloguing a person herbarium/plant collection by  Linda P.J. Lipsen. Released 10th Feb 2023 by the Royal British Columbia Museum, it's 96 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

The cataloguing and organization of plant material into a cohesive (and correctly identified) herbarium is admittedly exotic, academic, and (some would say) tweedy hobby. It's also deeply steeped in adventure, history, and exploration. Early explorers were hardy and fearless and raced to find and bring back heretofore unknown species. As a result, botanical material was crated and shipped wholesale (generally unidentified) back to be bought and curated into private and public collections worldwide. This book is written for hobbyist collectors and for building readers' private collections, but there are flashes of the same adventure and wanderlust in the author's instruction included here.

The book is arranged logically, with chapters divided thematically: building a field kit and collecting tools (including a good overview on sourcing and evaluating what to get and where), collecting plant material, pressing & drying, mounting, preserving & organizing, and identifying specimens. The text is enhanced throughout with tips set apart by identifying icons indicating reusable/recycling ideas, tips and tricks, and checklists for fieldwork. The text is enhanced throughout by simple line drawings and graphics rendered by Derek Tan. Although quite simple, they enhance and inform the text. The author has also included a solid bibliography to get collectors started with ID and classification, as well as a cross referenced index (not provided in the ARC for review).

Four stars. It's an admittedly niche book, but I heartily recommend it to readers who enjoy academic collections and who really enjoy seeing collections of *stuff* being arranged and catalogued and ordered. Beautifully done and well illustrated. This would also be an excellent choice for public or school library, activity groups, maker's groups, smallholders and similar.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.