The Plant Press

I've been pressing plants since 1972 and Dr. Spellenberg's Plant Taxonomy course at NMSU.  Back then I packed a small pair of solid 1/2" thick boards tied together with sleeping bag straps up into the Organ Mountains when I was climbing.  My collection (limited by the lack of a car) was mostly from in town and made up of lots of ornamentals.  

Then in grad school at the U of A, we had proper presses with real corrugates.  The Grasses, Legumes, and Composites course was really a challenge.  But field work with Dr. Gibson involved collecting cacti, notoriously difficult to preserve.  Some of my materials are still in the permanent collection.  As a teaching assistant for Dr. Mason's Plant Taxonomy class, I was out every weekend in a university truck collecting material for the next week's dissection.  And then there was a trip deep into Mexico looking for Stegnosperma cubense near Vera Cruz.  Along the way, I managed to climb Iztaccihuatl (and later, Popocatépetl). 

After that, I did little in the way of plant collection.  Anything I did harvest had to be layered in paper towels or newspaper and squashed under a stack of heavy books. 

Now in retirement and active with the Botanic Garden, I've been using their plant press... until this past Christmas.  Caro got me a proper full-sized personal plant press.  Also a small microwave plant dehydrator.  I've been hay baling ever since.  Here's today's harvest of 3 (out of 4) Hibiscus blooms.

These are now in the press along with dozens of other winter blossoms from plants in the sun room. 

From Wikipedia, "The botanical gardens of the modern tradition were established in northern Italy, the first being at Pisa (1544), founded by Luca Ghini (1490–1556).  Although part of a medical faculty, the first chair of materia medica, essentially a chair in botany, was established in Padua in 1533.  Then in 1534, Ghini became Reader in materia medica at Bologna University, where Ulisse Aldrovandi established a similar garden in 1568.  Collections of pressed and dried specimens were called a hortus siccus (garden of dry plants) and the first accumulation of plants in this way (including the use of a plant press) is attributed to Ghini.  Buildings called herbaria housed these specimens mounted on card with descriptive labels.  Stored in cupboards in systematic order they could be preserved in perpetuity and easily transferred or exchanged with other institutions, a taxonomic procedure that is still used today."