Month: March 2024

Noted without comment

A letter from Dr. Samuel Johnson, to his friend Dr. Lawrence whose wife had just died:

“The loss, dear Sir, which you have lately suffered, I felt many years ago, and know therefore how much has been taken from you, and how little help can be had from consolation. He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentimant and action is stopped; and life stands suspended suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.”

from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 20 Jan. 1780

Cheap pocket plant press

Photo of the materials listed, laid out on a work table.

(1) This pocket plant press is made from a stack of 3 x 5 index cards, salvaged corrugated cardboard, cheap watercolor paper, and rubber bands. Cut two pieces of corrugated cardboard to 3 x 5 inches. Cut two pieces of cheap watercolor paper to the same size. Find a flower, and blot it dry with paper towels.

A flower arranged on the open plant press

(2) Place one piece of corrugated cardboard down. Stack half the file cards on top of it. Place a piece of watercolor paper on top of that. Arrange the flower on this stack. Then make another stack of corrugated cardboard, file cards, and watercolor paper.

The completed stack, the flower is in the middle with its stem sticking out.

(3) Assemble the stack with the corrugated cardboard on the outside. Wrap the assembly with the rubber bands. If the stem of the flower is sticking out, you can trim it off with scissors.

Side view of the assembled stack, showing the layers.

Now let it dry for at least a week. Longer if the weather is humid, or the flower is especially moist. If you want the flower really flat, stack some heavy books on top of the plant press.

The watercolor paper takes the place of blotter paper in a real plant press. In some cases, the pressed flower may leave a colored image on the watercolor paper, so with some experimentation you should be able to use this technique to make pressed flower monoprints.

The stack of file cards makes the plant press stiffer, and helps spread the pressure of the rubber bands out evenly. You can also press several flowers in this plant press by using alternating layers of file cards, watercolor paper, and flowers.

(This is a follow up to this post. And for the finished product, see this post.)

Plant presses and nature collage art

I’m in the process of developing curriculum for a couple of different eco-spirituality programs I’ll be co-leading this summer. One of the people I’ll be working with, Jessica, a former environmental educator who’s now the DRE at the Northhampton UU congregation, floated the idea of pressing plants.

Now, plant pressing is usually done to prepare specimens for an herbarium. But Jessica found a lesson plan in the Project Wild Aquatic curriculum book which uses a plant press for a process art project. You assemble a collage of aquatic plants (or really, any kind of plant) between sheets of porous paper, and press in a plant press. As the plant is pressed, the paper absorbs some of the colors of the plant. Wait a week till it’s dry, and you have a cool collage.

This activity kind of resembles flower pounding (see lesson plan #24 on this webpage). It also introduces participants to the use of a plant press — a standard botanical tool/process — which is a nice addition.

Still working on refining this activity for use with kids in a summer camp setting. We’ll see where this leads. In the mean time, a couple of resources: Plant presses for the classroom | Herbarium Supply Co.

Update, later the same day:

Here are my instructions for a cheapo plant press, cobbled together from several online sites:

You’ll need fifty 3×5 file cards, two pieces of corrugated carboard cut to 3×5 inches, and two strong rubber bands. Place a flower in the middle of the stack of file cards. Put the rubber bands around everything (see the drawing). Let dry for a week or more. When dry, glue the dried flower to the index card using white glue.

Sketch of the flower press described in the text

Snowdrops are starting to bloom outside our front door, so in a couple of days I’ll be able to give this a try in the real world.

(And here’s the follow up post where I actually make one of these.)

Juanita Nelson oral history

Juanita Nelson (1923-2015) was a war tax resister, a participant in the Civil Rights Struggle, and a back-to-the-lander. I just found a great oral history interview with her on the website for Massachusetts Department of Higher Education website.

One of the reasons I’m interested in Juanita Nelson is that she had no particular religious leanings one way or another; as she put it, she was not “religiously oriented.” And she was this way long before it was cool to be a None (i.e., to have no particular religious affiliation). Yet much of her life was spent seeking out and building intentional community, and spent in pursuing the highest moral and ethical values — and in that sense, she was what I’d call religious. She was also “religion-adjacent,” in part because she spent the last half of her life homesteading on land provided by a Quaker retreat center, and in part because so many war tax resisters are members of the historic peace churches.

Another reason I’m interested in her is that she’s a fascinating person in her own right. Someone should write a full-length biography of her — I’d buy it!