How to collect, store and decorate leaf herbariums?

2024 Author: Sierra Becker | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-26 03:47

With the onset of autumn, schoolchildren and their parents often go for a walk in the forest. And not only to enjoy the last warm days. Very often the purpose of such weekends is to collect natural material. After all, children will need to make herbariums from leaves. October is especially good for this, when all the foliage turns bright yellow and red. Having correctly preserved such a "harvest", you can then deal with its design on long winter evenings. Or even make paintings or crafts from dried plants with your own hands.

Collecting materials for the herbarium

But first you need to choose the right foliage and flowers for drying. If there is too much moisture in them, they can become moldy or even rot. And therefore, in order for leaf herbariums to retain a presentable appearance for a long time, you need to know the rules for collecting material.

1. "Hunting" for leaves-flowers is necessarytake only on a dry and sunny day. Drying wet plants is much harder.

2. You need to choose from fallen leaves only whole, unspoiled specimens. They must be dry.

3. To bring future leaf herbariums home, it is advisable to take files and packages with you. It is better to put each sample in a separate folder, you can supplement it with a note about the place and time of collection.

Preparation of collected material

Now that everything interesting in the forest has been collected, we need to dry it and save it. There are several ways to make a herbarium from leaves. They are used depending on which plants were collected and how they are planned to be used. The most popular method is pressure drying. The sheet is placed between two pieces of tracing paper or paper and then placed in a book or under a small board. A few more impressive volumes are laid out on top. After 2 weeks, a do-it-yourself herbarium of leaves will be ready. This technique is best for drying autumn leaves and small flowers.

The second method involves drying with an iron. First you need to cover the sheet with paper, and then iron it with a warm iron until it dries completely. Compared with the first case, it significantly speeds up preparation, but is completely unsuitable for fragile flowers and thin leaves. In addition, under the influence of high temperature, the color of the material may change.

Another way to preserve all the beauty of fresh plants. To do this, leaves or flowers are collected in bunches and hung upside down in a dark, cool place until completely dry. Rosebuds, chamomile flowers and other branches with flowers and fruits can be dried in this way.

Decoration of the herbarium

When all the leaves and flowers have dried, you can start decorating them. This stage will probably take more than one evening. But then you can enjoy your work with pleasure. If the herbaria of leaves and flowers will be used as a guide for natural history, you can stick each copy on a separate sheet and put it in a file. Each such page must be supplemented with a commemorative inscription with the name of the plant, the time and place of its collection. It remains only to collect everything in a binder folder.

And these plants can also be used to make interesting crafts. By the way, in elementary school, children often do this at labor lessons. These can be beautifully decorated paintings, illustrations for fairy tales, small models of parks and squares, etc. Such a pastime will perfectly brighten up any winter evening.