Seeds of inspiration
When Susan Hardy Brown first volunteered at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in 1985, she never thought she would spend the next 25 years saving bits of leaves and sprigs of grass for her artwork. Hardy Brown is an artist by training and a nearby resident and frequent visitor to the lush, 265-acre landscape that is a haven for both research and relaxation. Initially, she simply offered to scrounge the grounds for forsythia and lilacs for a curatorial review of the living collections. “I didn’t even know what a herbarium was,” she said. Now she does. A year later, Hardy Brown joined the staff of the Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum (one of the six that make up the Harvard University Herbaria). Since then, she has been meticulously collecting, sorting, pressing, mounting, labeling, and recording the thousands of plant samples received each year from around the globe. For Hardy Brown, the...