The Otto Douglas Hyde Herbarium meticulously documents plants—and creates one-of-a-kind botanical notecards.

An herbarium is a collection of carefully preserved plants, a means of documenting where plants grow and recording details about their morphology (the physical properties of the plant’s structure). For botanists, ecologists, and even pharmaceutical researchers, it is a library of past and present data that will inform the future.

For plant lovers, an herbarium is a diary of our planet’s biodiversity, each carefully prepared and mounted specimen, a love letter to, and from, nature. Like when a pressed leaf of redbud hazel (Disanthus cercidifolius), a shrub that’s prized for its crimson fall color, becomes a Valentine.

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GROW in The Seattle Times.