FIELD STUDY Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium

Poet and writer Helen Humphreys narrates her own meditative exploration of one herbarium's vast botanical specimen collection. Listeners discover the lost art of amateur botany and learn about a time, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when foliage and flowers were rigorously collected and cataloged. The author's curiosity for every discovered subject--both plant life and the humans who collected and preserved them--is evident through her relaxed, open performance. This makes listeners care, too, as they travel through time, plant biology, and place. Sadly, the audio version cannot show how the author integrates botanical illustrations into her poetic text. Humphrey's exploration of plants collected in Arizona and New Mexico is particularly engaging, and her descriptions of the groundbreaking work of botanist and artist Sara Plummer Lemmon is fantastically fun. J.T. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2022]