296 The Complete Home Guide to Herbs, Natural Healing, and Nutrition
lushness or density of the plant you are pressing. Once it is really dry and
there is no longer any more water content, there will be far less risk of the
color fading.
To mount your plant pressings, use a white background and glue.
Label, using both the botanical name and the common name. If you can,
list the kind of area and soil you found your plant growing in.
Take at least one year over your herbal profi le — though two are often
needed, and the pleasure doubled! It is important that you experience
each season with the plants or trees of your choice. It can be fun to
photograph the plant one season and paint it the next, or photograph the
berries or fl owers and paint the whole plant.
When writing a description of the plants, you may wish to use
botanical language, but do so only if it means something to you. For
instance, palmate is a botanical term for the visual description of a plant
with leaves that resemble the outspread hand. Otherwise, simply describe
the plant in language that means something to everybody, including
yourself. Note the exact sensory details as seen, felt, and experienced by
you, for instance, “the beautiful blue-gray bark is also smooth, shiny, and
smelling faintly musky-sweet in summer, but hardly smelling at all in
winter.” Make sure you describe everything — the roots, stem, bark,
height, breadth, color, shape, size, leaf shape and size, fl owers, seeds, fruit,
needles, and smells. Keep the information easy to read, adding
subheadings like “Flowering Time” to help both the writer and the
reader.
Dealing descriptively in this much detail involves spending many hours
of intimate time with each plant. This could involve sleeping against your
chosen tree or peering at it through a magnifying glass. Both approaches
will be needed. Watching plants with so much sensitivity gives you
pleasure and joy, with a sense of bonding to nature. Writing down the
plant’s active components and medicinal uses will be additionally helpful.
You will gain much from knowing the action of a plant in relation to a
particular body system as well as the actual diseases it treats.
Folklore will bring a sense of historical use into your quest, while
modern scientifi c research will give you even more invaluable
information.