PRESSING PLANTS FOR ART AND SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Where: Third House, near Deep Hollow Ranch, Montauk

When: Saturday November 22, 2025, 10:00 am – 2:00 pm

From the field to the herbarium and studio, botanist Daniel Atha covers the essentials of making museum-quality preserved plant specimens suitable for research, education and the arts. Students will gain the knowledge and skill to add to existing herbaria or develop one for use as a permanent floristic record, study-aid or graphic art project.

Drawing on extensive experience at one of the world’s premier botanical institutions, this course is designed for the anyone who wishes to document plants for biological inventories; taxonomy and systematics (including DNA studies); wetland and rare plant surveys; regulatory compliance; natural products discovery; ethnobotany; teaching; and decorative art.

Students will learn how to select the best material for preservation; how to use a plant press; how to arrange the specimen to optimize analysis and aesthetics; how to dry; what to record in the notebook; how to write and format the most informative specimen labels; and how to arrange and mount plants using archival materials for long-term preservation.

Instructor: Daniel Atha retired from the New York Botanical Garden after three decades of plant collecting and research in all 50 states of the US as well as Vietnam, Bolivia, Mexico, Belize, South America and the Caucasus of western Asia. He has collected over 16,000 specimen numbers; published a book on the plants of Belize and over sixty scientific papers; discovered, described and illustrated the new species Acalypha gentlei, and; was the lead author on a botanical inventory of New York’s Central Park. His work in research, conservation and art has appeared in the New York Times, AP News, The Daily Mail, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, the journal Nature, Taxon, Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society, Phytotaxa, Phytoneuron, Brittonia, Sida and others. He lives in New York City and is currently writing a book on the ecological history of Central Park.

REGISTER HERE

For more information contact Vicki Bustamante, vickibustamante@gmail.com