In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss

Harvard University Museum of Natural History

I recently collaborated with Leah Sobsey, Dr. Emily Meineke, and Dr. Marsha Gordon on a mutlimedia installation that leverages Henry David Thoreau’s pressed plant specimens, housed at Harvard University’s Herbaria. Thoreau’s collection is a botanical time machine that lives in combination with the naturalist’s extensive notes about when and where his specimens were collected, which our installation draws from to provide insight into environmental change.

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss is an immersive multidisciplinary experience that marries art and science through a modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s preserved plants. Thoreau was prolific in his practice of collecting botanical samples and plants are important indicators of how our world is responding to climate change.  Long preserved in the Harvard University Herbaria, 648 specimens serve as the foundation of this new exhibition. The digitization of the specimens, and others in the Herbaria collection, are now allowing broader access to scholars and citizen scientists, in turn welcoming new domains of scholarship.

The exhibition invites visitors to experience emotionally resonant connections to the profound loss of natural diversity caused by human-induced climate change. The exhibition urges us to ask, “What do Thoreau’s findings tell us about what plants are winning, and what plants are losing, in the face of climate change today?”