Field study Meditations on a year at the herbarium

"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. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Sept.)

The autumn leaves floating down over the field look like brightly coloured birds falling to earth. We have just left the pine wood and are on the path that my walking companion calls Carnage Alley, because there are often feathers, or blood, or bits of dead animal on this route. The victims of coyotes perhaps, or the owls that hunt above this field at dusk. Easier to catch something in the open than in the tangled wrack of forest trees, and even now there is a northern harrier skimming the tops of the asters and milkweed. ...It seems otherworldly, an owl's head on a hawk's body, the elegant drift of its hunger. This place of woods and meadow and marsh is paradise. My paradise. Where I walk every day, all through the seasons. It always seems to be teeming with wildlife and plant life, but things have changed even in the handful of years I have been coming here. Now there are deer ticks on all the forest paths and in the open fields. The toxic wild parsnip is creeping through the meadows, and an invasive feathery reed, phragmites, is choking out the wetlands. The bobolinks and meadowlarks, who used to be plentiful every summer, are now virtually non-existent. Habitat loss, pollution, climate change, human overpopulation and encroachment -- these are some of the main reasons for the decline and changes to ecosystems. Much of the damage is irreversible, and the prognosis for the future is grim. And yet, I believe there is still a profound need within human beings to connect to the natural world. How to reconcile these two things? ...I am interested in exploring this relationship, to write from a place that doesn't look away from the environmental changes wrought by humankind and that also celebrates the connections that still exist between people and nature. To do this, I have chosen to concentrate on the phenomenon of the herbarium. These libraries of dried plant specimens -- some hundreds of years old -- seem the perfect crucible in which to examine the intersection of human beings and the natural world through time. Each herbarium specimen is mounted on a sheet of paper with a label affixed by the collector, providing details of the plant and the location where it was found, but also including information about the person who preserved the plant. In this way the herbarium becomes a place, a landscape if you will, where the experience of people connecting with nature is revealed. I cannot think of another place where it is possible to look into the past and see the moment an orchid was plucked from the forest floor or a willow frond was cut from a branch. A visit to the herbarium is an exquisite kind of time travel. And by learning more about the intersection of people and nature in the past, I hope to gain some understanding of where we can go from here. Excerpted from Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium by Helen Humphreys All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.