Marking Time in Nature: The Quarantine Herbarium in Historical Perspective

Elaine Ayers, Ph.D.

Wagner Free Institute of Science

Wednesday, July 8, 2020 6:30 pm EDT

Online Event

This talk will take place on Zoom. A link and instructions will be in the post-registration online event page and sent out by email.
 
Launched at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, The Quarantine Herbarium is a participatory project designed to connect people to the plants growing in their immediate vicinities: to the grasses, weeds, trees, and kitchen plants that we often overlook in our busy everyday lives. Intended to mark the passage of time during a season of socially distanced walks, victory gardens, and escapes to nature, the project offers a low-stakes, open-ended way for anyone, regardless of skill level, to contribute to a floral map and diary of how we interact with our environments when we’re stuck inside. The Quarantine Herbarium now holds over 250 images of plants collected all over the world, and it’s growing day by day. It's even made it to Atlas Obscura.
 
In this talk, Ayers will contextualize this project within the history of botanical exchange networks that inspired it, drawing attention to the ways in which nineteenth century men and women—many of whom were considered “hobbyists”—collected, preserved, and built communities around the plants in their local environments. By looking outside of more formalized professional botanical institutions and by thinking critically about the history of “citizen science,” we can begin to untangle the systems of inequality built into the plant sciences that have elevated some voices and silenced others while making a place for the oftentimes unnamed contributors to environmental knowledge systems.