A Love of Plants
This work comes from a love of Brigid's own plants that she began preserving in phone books and dictionaries.

Brigid saw something in preserved plants that she hadn’t seen before in the plants she grew, and often couldn't keep growing.

Once the realization occurred that preserved plants reveal characteristics that can’t be seen otherwise, everything started to look different.

Trips to the grocery store were more like research into produce departments and resulted in more pressing experiments than actual food for consumption. Then the trips to and from the store and elsewhere really became about what was growing on the side of every road: these were dangerous drives. Farmers markets, friends’ yards, people she knew with land and eventually strangers she approached became resources for the variety of plant life she collects.

Study with Botanists
Study to learn about plants and their archiving took different forms, including studying with botanists, volunteer work with plant preservationists in the scientific community, interviewing, reading, collecting, experimenting, traveling... and pressing and preserving. There was an early workshop organized by California botanists for plant enthusiasts on Catalina Island that introduced the importance of classification. The mounting tricks learned from the staff of plant preservation and mounting specialists at the famous. St. Louis herbarium showed what could be done with everything from coconuts to seaweed.

Collecting
Collecting plants is an adventure for Brigid. Wild hops growing on the banks of the Missouri. Soy fields in Kansas. Dried Ocotillo in the Arizona low land, still suffering from run-off from the abandoned copper mine. Invasive California Rip-Gut that tears up the stomach of whatever eats it. She keeps finding people who own uncultivated land that let her collect what she wants.

Respect
Brigid tries to maintain and respect the original form, and to capture that wildness. Brigid’s preservation and mounting methods create an opportunity to see a natural, uncontrived beauty that can't be seen otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brigid Greene
last updated 08/04