The Curious Beekeeper
Crushing It: Pressed Plants for Beekeepers
The first pressed plants I remember fell from a tattered hymnal. Three tiny pink roses tied with a narrow ribbon, and several four-leaf clovers, wafted to the floor as my younger self flipped through the book, looking for pictures. Although thoroughly dry, the specimens were supple enough to touch and hold upright, turn and examine. In colors muted but true, they smelled sweetly herbaceous, gently reminding me of sun-warmed silage.
This accidental run-in with dried plants compelled me to experiment, so I pressed some purple violets and a stalk of forget-me-knots between the pages of a yellowed “Great Expectations,” a volume with its own peculiar scent. Afterward, I discovered pressed plants everywhere: framed on walls, displayed in museum cases, and squashed under the glass of ubiquitous coffee tables. To me, they were art: no more, no less.
Pressured into pressing
No one forced me to press plants until many years later in a plant taxonomy course. Baffled and disappointed, I learned taxonomic specimens were riddled with rules. The mounting paper was a prescribed weight and size, the arrangement of plants on the page was preordained, and the method of attaching plant to paper was sacrosanct. Even the labels followed strict guidelines. Until then, I thought flat and dry was good enough.
I spent the following months collecting plants, mounting specimens, and struggling with dichotomous keys. The vocabulary of plants is even drier than that of bees, and to this day, when I work with keys, I waste valuable time paging through the glossary, trying to distinguish glaucous from glabrous, pinnate from palmate.
Despite bouts of frustration, I look back on the process with fondness. I especially loved the smells that escaped the drying kilns, the musty scent of plywood presses, the sisal ropes we used for straps, and the corrugated cardboard between each specimen. I loved the odor of the mounting glue, the perfumy hint
of crushed flowers, and the spicy bite of leaves.
As the plants dried, their colors shifted. Some faded into pallid greens, but others devolved into muddy shades of biscuit and mushroom. The leaves, although gossamer, gauzy, and ethereal, remained …
