Pressing leaves, an old habit
I found the old album at the back of a drawer — leaves collected at nine years old, labelled in enormous handwriting, most of them oak because the oak was nearest. The colours have gone the brown of weak tea, but the shapes are perfect, thirty years on.
How it is done, which is barely anything
Pick them dry, ideally in the afternoon. A leaf with dew on it will mark the paper and sometimes go mouldy in the press. Lay each one flat between two sheets of plain newsprint, stack the sheets, and put the whole thing under something heavy and even. A press is nice. A stack of books is identical in every way that matters.
- change the paper after two days, while the leaf is still giving up water
- then leave it a fortnight and forget about it
- oak and birch hold colour well; maple fades fastest, so press it fresh
Why bother
Because it costs nothing, takes four minutes a week, and produces a record that outlasts almost everything else I have kept. Photographs of the garden are all slightly the same. A pressed leaf is the actual leaf, from the actual autumn.
The new album is a cheap sketchbook with the leaves held down by paper corners rather than glue, so they can come out again. Dates in pencil in the corner, nothing else. No system, no labels in Latin. That was what killed the habit the first time.