Pressing flowers and other discoveries

 I was attending to the birthday bouquet, and needed to remove a couple of tithonia, aka Mexican sunflower. If you've ever grown these, you'll be aware that the stems break easily. Beautiful flower heads on frail stems.

And I wondered how they were holding up so well here. Then found out why. See this?

 Little plastic tube, works like a splint. Brilliant. As the stem takes up water, it swells and fills the tube firmly.

And I decided to press the two heads I'd removed, once in a while I like to do this.  Emily Dickinson used to press flowers a lot, in fact there are notebooks of them, pasted in, annotated, in Amherst.  Very keen on botany. 

And I was thinking about this while I got organized to press these flowers, my method being to put them between layers of paper towel, insert them in the bookcase under a stack of books, and quite often forget I've done it.  I was humming and thinking about this,when I suddenly noticed, between the books I was pulling out, a paper towel. And exploring further found this

Pansies and maybe primrose, from years ago.  I wonder if Emily ever had this issue. Anyway, it was the exact same books I'd used years ago for this purpose, and I now realize why.

The stack included a book on dyeing, using plants, and the lovely Edith Holden's Diary, a facsimile of her real country diary for 1906. She was a botanical illustrator, and her work is just wonderful to revisit.  Since this is a facsimile, it's not just a reprint, but an actual photographic version of her own handwriting, drawing and painting, and the browned edges are exactly true to the original.  I've had this for ages, and it's just a lovely form. So it seemed like a meaningful book to help me press flowers.

If you love good illustration, and diary forms, and interesting poems and quotations added in where they fit, take a look.  I will now reread this. 

Here's a double page spread, look at the composition as well as the colors and shapes. This is way beyond meticulous copying.

 And here's the main page for December.  If you can get hold of this book now, I've had my copy for decades, not sure it it's out there, you'll be glad you did.