Notes from My Herbarium. II

Abstract

As the spring of i895 opened and the first delicate green began to appear, I found myself considering how I should add to my herbarium. All the plants that I might collect in the vicinity of Cambridge were already represented in my collection in flower, fruit, root and seed, and it seemed at first as if I must wait till the summer vacation might give me an opportunity of visiting some fresh locality. I was strolling one day over a bit of waste land, watching the little plants pushing their tiny heads above the ground, and thinking how jmpossible it was for me to name a single one of them in that early stage of their growth, when suddenly it occurred to me to make a collection of seedlings. Why shouldn't they have a place and an important place, too, in an herbarium? They are the beginning, the promise of the future plant, and yet we pass them by and refuse to recognize them. Then it would be interesting to compare these early forms with the full-grown plants and to see how the leaves in the two cases resembled each other. So I decided then and there to make a collection of as many seedlings as I could. This I did, and during the months of May, June and July I was engaged in as fascinating a piece of work as I have ever done in a botanical way. My principal collecting grounds in Cambridge were of three kinds, waste land such as produces the ordinary garden weeds, a bit of bog frequented only by the botanist, and a salt marsh. My baby press and collecting box were constant companions and they never did better service. When I found a patch of seedlings, I collected a number of them carefully, and if they were small enough, as was generally the case, they went right into the little press. I then marked the spot in some way for future visits, and in the case of some species I made as many as half a dozen trips to the same patch, taking away specimens each time, for I wanted the collection to show the species from the seedling to the full grown plant, or at least to an identifiable form, all collected from the same spot. Some-