Have you ever pressed flowers from the garden? Take a flower you want to preserve, place it inside some tissue paper, and then sandwich it inside a nice, heavy book. After a few weeks you’ll find that the flower is flat, dry, and will last for years. But what happens if you forget you ever put it there?
Visitors to a London Museums of Health and Medicine museum and library handling session on 17 November found a beautiful surprise as they leafed through one of our books. Nestling between the pages of John Gerard’s Herball, or generall historie of plantes was a small pressed flower with tiny leaf still attached.
Gerard’s Herbal is a pretty hefty book. It’s over 1,300 pages long, measures 23×33×10cm, and weighs around 4kg, so it’s a perfect candidate to use to press flowers. It’s a compendium of plants that grow in the British Isles and beyond. It describes their physical characteristics, where they grow, variant names, and their medicinal properties.
This little flower – about 3cm wide and 4cm tall – has been identified as a legume, most probably the bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). Several types of trefoil appear later on in the herbal, but this specimen was found on pages describing bugloss. Maybe its collector was confused about the identification? The book dates from 1597, but we can't say when exactly the flower was left there.
The bird’s-foot trefoil isn’t the only plant that’s ever been kept inside the book. Other pages show stains from specimens that have long since been removed. Only their ghostly after-images now remain.
Gerard’s Herbal isn’t our only book with plant specimens hidden inside. At the other end of the size scale is Plantarum index horti Pisa, a very rare catalogue of the plants in the university garden at Pisa. It was compiled by Thomas Belluccio and published in 1662. It’s only 11 cm tall, has only 64 tiny pages, and weighs in at under 50 g, making it a very convenient size for a pocket but not so useful for pressing flowers.
Tucked in between some of the pages are tiny sprigs of plants; a small piece of dark green yew tree near the beginning, and further on a fragment from a plant in the acacia family.
There are all sorts of things to discover in and around early printed books: spectacular illustrations, beautiful bindings, readers’ annotations, the marks of damage and damp, and sometimes even the odd long-dead bug or beastie. These beautiful plant specimens – left behind maybe for hundreds of years – are yet another testament to the varied lives of the books in our library.
Katie Birkwood
Rare books and special collections librarian
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