Herborizing as a form of mindfulness: a history

Charles Darwin's botanical mentor Professor John Henslow called the collecting and pressing of wild plants "herborizing". My research exploring how Victorian naturalists used plant pressing reveals a hidden history of science connected to spiritual and mindful practices.

Victorian naturalists are often associated with obsessive collecting, which in particular saw wild ferns stripped from many sites during the peak of the fern craze between about 1840 and 1870. Yet there is another side to botanical practices in Victorian Britain.

Plant pressing's hidden history

Botany was especially popular among artisan working-class people around the burgeoning industrial cities in the north of England. Many were weavers who lived in the villages around the outskirts of Manchester and worked from home on handlooms. Why did so many turn to the study of wild plants?

Today we think of scientific specimens as being objective, emotionless records and so not involving any aesthetic appreciation by the scientists involved. Victorian botanists took a different approach.

Herbarium-making as scientific and spiritual

“the scientific study of plants, collecting and pressing, was often a spiritual practice .”

Many took up the study of plants as a relief from the labour of their factory manufacturing work, enjoying field botany on their days off. Collecting wild flowers was an affordable alternative to the costly garden plants that middle-class people were avidly collecting from around 1840. These artisans argued that wild plants were more aesthetically pleasing than showy, man-made garden plants. The idea that the 'artificial' was not as beautiful as the 'natural', God-created forms, emerged among these working-class botanical communities by around 1840. This view of 'wild' being preferable as closer to God's Creation then developed into an aesthetic garden style. William Robinsons's 1870 book The Wild Garden argued that this wild style was more elegant and tasteful than the bold colourful plantings fashionable in the mid-Victorian period. Robinson followed on from the earlier artisan field botanists to promote native wild flower species in preference to nursery-bred varieties. So underlying this horticultural fashion for wild gardening was a serious commitment to studying God's creation. Victorians often collected wild plants and made herbaria as a spiritual practice. Their scientific work increased their faith in a creator God; and their faith made them accurate and productive scientific observers.

This balance between art, faith, and science did not suddenly change in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's book the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin's famous tome distracts us from what else was going on in mid-Victorian Britain. Instead, from the 1860s, the professionalized organisation of science in new colleges and universities, combined with an increasing focus on objectivity in the natural sciences and across society more generally, together created a persuasive story of an inevitable conflict between objective, accurate science on the one hand, and subjective, inaccurate religious belief on the other. Scientists held the key to understanding the natural world; whereas the Church should no longer hold sway over the teaching of what was still called 'natural philosophy' until the 1880s. This science versus religion myth is so convincing that historians of science and religion continue to bemoan how their research refuting it for the Victorian period remains ignored, especially by scientists writing histories of their subject! Yet for most Victorians themselves, no such conflict existed. Science was integral to their spiritual - or we could say mindful in today's term - appreciation of nature's beauty and diversity.

Science as a wellbeing practice?

“herborizing is an aesthetic and spiritual practice, a form of mindfulness.”

I first herborized as a child in the 1970s, and now I have returned to plant pressing in my 50s, managing Crohn's disease and a mental health condition. I find that identifying, pressing and arranging plants is a slow practice that makes me notice small details and keeps me in the moment. Pressing plants connects me to nature, but also to my ancestors, those Victorians who saw such beauty in their science. I believe that herborizing is a form of mindfulness; and that science, art and faith are different, yet equally important, ways in which we can learn about the natural world. What do you think?