Why We Keep the Plate Beside the Sheet

A herbarium sheet is an honest but fading document. Pressed flowers lose their pigment within years — violets go brown, yellows grey out — and after a few decades the sheet records shape and venation far better than colour.

This is why every accession here is filed against a historical plate where one exists. The Köhler and Curtis illustrations in the archive are not decoration; they are the colour record the dried specimen can no longer keep. Read together, the sheet and the plate say more than either does alone.