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FEATURE

THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS IN

THE BARNES ROAD HERBARIUM

A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens, pressed and mounted
on sheets of heavy white paper. Barnes Road in Brixton, Johannesburg, houses the

studio where this exhibition was made and a presentation was given by Prof. Isabel
Hofmeyr at the Origins Centre, Wits University.

Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr

he technique used is botanical contact printing
(also called eco-printing, or printing with
Tbotanicals), in which plant material is tightly
bundled with fabric or paper and boiled or steamed,
transferring an imprint of the leaf onto the substrate.

Both the herbarium and the eco-printing involve
pressed plants – on the herbarium sheet or rolled
tightly into bundles that are steamed. Both produce
37 YEARS forms of botanical illustration, but with a difference.

An imperial technique, botanical illustration extracts
a plant from its context, scales it neatly to the page,
makes it portable and amenable to hierarchical
classification systems. As specimens, herbarium
sheets share these features, yet they involve real
plants which are not always scalable to the page.
SINCE 1989 Plants are bent double, zig-zagged or curled into
arabesques.
Likewise in eco-printing, realistic renditions are
disrupted by the secret chemical lives of leaves
which produce unexpected outcomes. Acid creates
bubbles; tannin results in different colours – purple,
pale blue, red and brown.
These features reveal the biochemistry of the leaf not
visible to the human eye, and we witness the death of
a leaf in the birth of the image.

Information supplied by Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr, Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research, University
of the Witwatersrand. isabel.hofmeyr@wits.ac.za Examples of botanical contact printing, also called eco-printing, by Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr n

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