Drying Green Herbarium, Inverclyde Libraries

by Michelle Crawford, Library Service Development Officer and project lead, for Green Libraries Week 2024

We applied to the Green Libraries Scotland Grant Fund in 2024 with an aim to develop Inverclyde’s own Herbarium. Plants preserved in herbaria offer unique perspectives on global change and its consequences as they are directly affected victims, and herbaria can inform us about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change and invasive species. To increase and sustain the value of herbaria for the future, we need to look to the maintenance and curation of herbaria including continued collection efforts and the digitization of collections.

We proposed a programme of engagement with partners in the Watt Institution, using the Watt Institution Herbarium as a starting point and looking to create The Drying Green Herbarium based around our library community. Our partnership working with local arts organisation RIG Arts meant that the garden at South West Library ‘The Drying Green’ already had an established, dedicated group of volunteers. The Herbarium will give them the opportunity to create something lasting to preserve the garden and the work for future generations. In addition to this, the workshops that we run will also allow new visitors to the library and garden to get involved, potentially encouraging new volunteers.

Split over 13 workshops, we have aimed to balance learning, creation and discovery, allowing participants to learn more about the environment around them whilst giving them an opportunity to develop a record of their creation, detailing the local floral and plant life, and preserving it for future generations.

Our first workshop was a wild mushrooms and foraging walk delivered by local environmental educator Wander and Wonder. Participants were encouraged to come along to the garden where they would find and examine some of the plants in the garden. Wander and Wonder then explained the uses of these plants both historically and in modern day. In addition to this, some of the pests in the garden were looked at in a new light as Wander and Wonder explored with participants the usefulness of some of the commonly found weeds. The participants then ventured further afield, exploring the different edible and non-edible plants that can be found when you know what to look for.

Each of the workshops has been given a designation of either create, learn, or discover. These designations give participants an idea of what they will gain from the workshop: for example, our next workshop in the programme was centred around close photography of flowers and plants, delivered by local photographer Steve Elliott. This workshop was designated as both learn and create. In it, participants learned how best to use the cameras most likely to be at their disposal, their phones, to take the best picture possible. Steve Elliott demonstrated how best to use the settings on phones to get the best outcome and showed how to edit using open source and free software. The outcome of this workshop is high quality images taken by members of the community that will be used in the completed Herbarium.

We have also reached out to our sister organisation, the Watt Institute, about an ongoing project that they are engaged in as it thematically fits the Herbarium’s aims. Their project is centred around using Inverclyde’s natural habitat to create a series of natural pigments. The culmination of these pigments will be a palette and series of artworks made using it, the colours of which will be made from the natural environment of Inverclyde. The project lead will meet with our gardening group to create a separate palette from the Drying Green and the pigments will then be used in artwork that will make up pages of the Herbarium.

Whilst the project is still in its early stages, public engagement has been good with each of the completed workshops being fully subscribed and a new volunteer joining the established garden group. The workshops scheduled will see participants using different creative methods to preserve the Drying Green. There will be cyanotype printing, linocutting, and more traditional Herbarium production through flower pressing and research and annotation. These creative workshops will culminate in a community that is further engaged with not just the Drying Green Garden and the library by extension but also the wider Inverclyde environment. Preservation through creation, discovery and education will see the final output of a 32-page Herbarium detailing the garden in a non-traditional sense. The Drying Green Herbarium will in a sense mirror the garden itself, as the effort, creativity, and love will also see it bloom for future generations.

Return to the Green Libraries Scotland Grant Fund main page.