After you collect your plant, its time to press the plant (or algae) to begin the drying process. It is important to do this as soon as you can, as you will usually have better results and avoid common issues such as wilting and colour loss.
- Take your specimen and arrange it within a piece of paper – usually newsprint (roughly size 12″x 17″) to match the size of herbarium mounting paper – on top of a piece of cardboard of roughly the same size.
2. Close the newsprint with the specimen arranged inside and write down the name, location, date and collection number for its collection label information.
3. Put a second piece of cardboard on top of your specimen and now continue the process with your next specimen. Repeat until your specimens become a wonderful large stack of your collecting experience, new knowledge of a region and hopefully shared knowledge of our biodiversity.
4. At the end of your specimen collection day, you will have a nice tall (or short) stack of specimens to begin the drying process.
Your potential to collect specimens is based on enthusiasm, curiosity and adventure. Take some friends along and it’s amazing what you can accomplish in a weekend! This UBC Herbarium and UBC Botanical Garden Foray weekend we collected, identified and submitted over 120 new specimens to add to our knowledge of British Columbia Flora!
Check out here our photos of what happened in one weekend. Collecting, of course, but also a road closure due to a missing part of the road, collecting Opuntia cactus (which was not my personal favourite). We also saw some beautiful scenery, got to scale cliff sides, saw some beautiful orchids (1, 2, 3), and, as always, made great memories. The photo below was a thunderstorm in the high alpine, Herbarium Pressing Emergency!
Drying Specimens