All kinds of collecting and herbariums were popular during the USSR, when many people sought do it yourself. Creating a herbarium will be interesting and useful activity primarily for children. The skill will also be useful for teachers at school to decorate a classroom corner or as visual material. During the USSR, 2 methods were common make a herbarium with your own hands: botanical folder and botanical press.

Herbarium - botanical folder

A botanical folder consists of two sheets of plywood or thick cardboard folded together, measuring 40 by 50 centimeters. Slots (holes) are cut in the sheets through which the braid is threaded. They wear it over the shoulder. You need to put sheets of drying paper inside. The folder can be made slightly smaller, for example 30 by 45 centimeters.

Herbarium - botanical press

The simplest is a press made from two sheets of plywood or two sheets of cardboard of the same format as the cut sheets of paper. It is useful to drill several holes in the cardboard through which moisture will evaporate better.

It is good to use a special botanical press for the herbarium. It's easy to make it yourself. It is made from two wooden frames, on which the intertwined metal grid or wire. Sheets of paper with straightened plants are placed between the frames, and the entire folder is tightly tied with a rope or belt.

Rules for drying plants for herbarium

Drying plants for herbari I lasts 3 - 4 days. The paper used is wrapping paper, unglued or newspaper (the format of double folded paper is 40×30 or 35×25 centimeters). Plants of equal thickness collected for the herbarium are carefully straightened and placed in paper. Very thick stems should be cut lengthwise. The sheets are placed under a press. You can place no more than 7-8 sheets of plants in one press, interlacing them with 7-8 sheets of paper. Transferring plants to dry paper should be done 3-4 times. The plants must be dry, otherwise they will turn brown when dried.

In good weather, the botanical press with plants is hung in the sun, in a draft, or in the wind. In rainy weather and at night, it is transferred to an extinguished stove, placed on an edge, or hung over a hot stove, under the roof in the attic.

Medicinal plants are dried in attics: they are spread out in one row on a board and turned over from time to time. DIY herbarium.

Drying ornamental plants for panels. All Compositae are dried in cotton wool. A thin layer of cotton wool is placed on the paper and covered with gauze. The front side of the chamomile is laid out on this layer and covered with cotton pads.

In dahlias and peonies with reverse side From the flower, remove the petals that interfere with normal drying using a penknife. A piece of cotton wool is inserted inside the small hole, where the flower was attached to the stem. Then 4-6 flowers are laid out on a cotton flooring with the cup facing the flooring. The petals are laid with a thin layer of cotton wool and covered with cotton wool on top. The stems and leaves are dried separately in plain paper.

Drying in the sand. To prevent flowers from changing their shape, they are dried in a different way. To do this, the flower is placed in a deep, high box and gradually covered with well-washed, dried and calcined sand. Such a box can be placed in the sun or in an attic under a metal roof. After about 5 days, the flowers will dry out.

Making a herbarium with your own hands

The dried plants are placed on a half-paper paper with a format of 30 by 20 centimeters and sewn or glued with strips of paper. To prevent the plant from darkening, do not glue it to the paper. Then they make a label and stick it on the right side, at the bottom of the herbarium sheet. Each plant attached to paper is covered with tissue or some other paper and placed in a bundle with the name of the topic for which the herbarium was collected.

The herbarium sheet looks very good under glass. A piece of cardboard is cut out according to the glass format and covered with light paper. A dried plant is sewn onto this background. Then cut strips of paper 4-5 centimeters wide. They are smeared with paste and glued on all four sides to the outer surface of the glass, retreating 2 centimeters from the edge. When the glue dries, clean glass is placed on the cardboard with the prepared plant, the edging is bent and glued to the cardboard from the back side.

It is necessary to arrange plants with taste and select a suitable background. A herbarium on a wide variety of topics should be created under glass. For example, the variety of stems, leaves and its structure, herbaceous plants forests, flower structure, medicinal plants,

Decoration in a box. Take thicker cardboard and place glass on it equal to the size of the box. Trace the glass with a pencil. The lines are slightly cut. After this, measure the height of the walls of the box and connect the points with a line (the remainder of the cardboard is cut off).

Then the square corners formed between the internal fold lines are cut out. The walls are bent along the internal lines. The corners are glued together with strips of paper. When the box is dry, it is covered with colored paper. The side strips of paper are folded and pasted over the bottom and sides from the inside by 2 - 3 centimeters.

For strength, a plywood board is placed at the bottom of the box, attached with pins, nails, and glue.

After the exhibits are placed in the box, it is covered with glass, straightened and the edges are sealed with tissue paper. When the box is dry, it is finally edged.

Mummies of fruits. To make mummies, a scalpel is used to make a hole in the fruit. small hole and extract all the contents from it. Then the inside is disinfected (2 - 3 hours) with formaldehyde or plain table salt, then internal walls the fruit is thoroughly wiped, stuffed with absorbent cotton wool and given to the fruit natural form. The cotton wool is changed 2 - 3 times.

In this form, the fruit should be placed in the sun for 1-2 days or dried over the stove for several hours.

The dried fruits are placed in a box. A twig with leaves is placed on a plywood board and attached. Then the fruit is placed. In the places where the fruits should be, a steel pin with a cotton wool flagellum on the cap is driven in. The flagellum is well smeared with wood glue. The edges and cotton wool inside the fruit are also lubricated with glue. Then it is tightly pinned onto a pin with a flagellum and held until it sticks.

Layout "Forest". Make a box measuring 50 by 70 centimeters with glass lid. On back wall paste the background - a blue sky with light clouds and a silhouette of a forest. You need to prepare samples of vegetation in advance: small branches various trees- birch, aspen, spruce, pine, linden; strawberries, lingonberries, ferns, lichens, moss; a variety of beneficial and harmful insects.

The bottom should be covered with moss and lichen, lingonberry bushes, strawberries, sorrel, and short grass. Small mushrooms are placed among the moss. Then, casually, as at the edge of a forest, they arrange the bark of the trees: thicker - close, thinner - far away. In several places they put 2 - 3 stumps and beetles are planted on them. Placed on birch leaves May beetles, and between the trees there are several butterflies. Far away you can place a snake, which seems to be crawling after its prey - a frog, and closer to the edge of the forest - a stuffed mole that crawled out of its hole, with a bird on a branch.

An article on how to make a herbarium with your own hands, from an old magazine from the times of the USSR

Before the Indian summer and frosts set in yet, you can make your own herbarium as a souvenir of summer! More precisely, pick flowers from flower beds and lawns, dry them, and when the mood strikes, make beautiful picture. If you didn’t have time, no problem, there’s plenty of snow on the trees beautiful leaves all colors and sizes! Now you will learn 3 ways to make beautiful paintings from flowers, both dry and freshly picked! And how to make a herbarium for school or kindergarten.

How to make a herbarium with your own hands

Traditional option.

1. Dry everything that we picked.
Important: you need to pick dry flowers, not after rain, wet ones can rot.

Dry it my way personal experience best in cardboard! I had thick cardboard packages. I didn’t like it in the newspaper, the thin flowers were simply imprinted into the newspaper and it was impossible to tear them off) It was better in a thick paper napkin. But I still liked it better in cardboard - even thick plants dried perfectly in it.

Place each flower so that it does not interfere with its neighbor, lay it with cardboard from below and above and press it with a heavy press. Encyclopedias and shelves with a bag of plaster on top worked for me. It dries for at least a week.

2. Making a background - the children themselves will be happy to paint a thick sheet of paper with watercolors or gouache.

Also, even the little ones can paint the frame with a brush or sponge. It is better to paint it with acrylic. If you paint it with gouache like I do - better later varnish.

3. On a separate sheet of paper, I advise you to lay out in advance what your future painting will look like.

4. To glue, a regular glue stick is enough. You need to smear the background, not necessarily everywhere - so that only the flowers and leaves do not crawl.

6. After gluing, cover and press with glass or plastic, which was in a frame (like mine in a small IKEA one) and you can rejoice - admire! Naturally, glass or plastic must be wiped in advance.

DIY herbarium with children is ready!

You can stamp the not yet dried leaves onto watercolor paper using a hammer!

How to make a beautiful picture of flowers
Choose flowers of bright colors!

Place it face down on watercolor paper, cover it with a napkin or paper towel and hit the flower with a hammer until the outline appears.

We remove the broken flower and a watercolor print remains.

And one more idea of ​​what to make from a herbarium
You can make a herbarium in a “vase” of fresh flowers and then dry it under pressure.

Happy creativity!

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Herbariums are usually made from dried flowers or leaves. This way you can create a whole collection. This is very interesting and educational activity for a child, which brings him closer to nature and allows him to learn a lot of new things about the plant world.

To collect flowers for the herbarium, choose a warm, sunny day for your walk. The collected plants must be dry, without drops of dew or rain, otherwise they may change color when dried. Pick flowers of 2-3 samples of each type in order to replace a damaged specimen if something happens.

How to properly dry a herbarium?

After collecting the plants and coming home, you should immediately put them out to dry. There are several ways to dry plants for herbarium.

1. The most convenient way to dry flowers and leaves is using a herbarium press - a large, heavy book. Before placing the plant between the pages, place it in a newspaper envelope to prevent moisture from damaging the book.
2. More quick way drying - with a hot iron. Iron the plant directly through the newspaper until completely dry.
3. You can also dry it in the microwave - it’s quick and convenient, but drying in natural conditions still preferable.
4. The herbarium can become original and stylish decoration interior, if you dry it, preserving its natural shape. To do this, you need to hang the flower upside down for several weeks in a warm room. You can also place cotton wool between the petals to absorb moisture.

Making a herbarium with your own hands

In order for you to have a beautiful and well-designed herbarium, you should know how to make it correctly. Here are the main principles of compiling a herbarium.

1. In order to beautifully arrange your collection, get a special folder for the herbarium, in which the plants will be located on separate sheets of thick paper.
2. Attach the flowers to the paper carefully so as not to break them. Use white strips for fastening or sew the plant stem with wide stitches in several places.
3. Don't forget to label each sample - its name, flowering time, collection location and other educational information.

Everyone has such a picture in their minds. You are leafing through a thick volume of poems, with pages yellowed from time to time, and somewhere closer to the last pages, suddenly an unexpected find! Dried bud - rose, violet, chamomile, or just a birch leaf...

Yes, an ordinary home herbarium often begins in a book.

Herbarium art

Herbarium (from the Latin “herbalist”) are dried plant samples, with descriptions and labels. Herbarium collections were originally used in botany for the purpose of creating scientific collections of plants from different places and environmental conditions. Thanks to the replenishment of herbarium collections modern society may have ideas about the preservation and disappearance of certain plant species.

The creation of herbariums makes it possible to systematize information about the plant world.

There are herbariums created for science, preserved for humanity. And there are decorative, homemade herbariums, created with your own hands for your own pleasure. It is precisely these herbariums that we will talk about in this article.

People love to collect various items and save them as a memory. Plants are no exception. Well, what woman would deny herself the pleasure of drying the first rose given by a loved one and then touching its petals with tenderness, even if they have already dried... For home herbarium Absolutely any plant materials can be used: leaves, flowers, cereals. I often want to save beautiful flowers from trips, or just leave a beautiful memory field cornflower. Houseplants can also be the basis for a herbarium; the leaves and flowers of most of them are very interesting.

There are no rules for creating decorative herbariums. All that matters here is your imagination, creative idea and ability to create something unique.

Choosing plants for the herbarium

The quality of the material matters great value, to obtain durable and beautiful finished work. Before creating a herbarium, think carefully about what exactly you want to get in the end. Dried plants can be attached to albums, on special paper and framed in a baguette; many craftsmen fill plants with resin, getting very beautiful jewelry. Dried plants are also used for scrapbooking, creating decorative panels and even for manicure! For your imagination to start working as powerfully as possible, it’s worth looking for inspiration on resources where people share their experiences in creating herbariums.

Some tips for choosing material:

• Only the best are used for the herbarium, healthy plants, at the peak of its flowering and development. Never use wilting plants that show signs of damage. If plants are collected in natural conditions, do this on a dry, fine day.
• The leaves for the herbarium must be clean and without creases. If these are the leaves of a plant that secretes milky sap, first dry the broken or cut areas well.
• Not all plants retain color well after drying. This can only be judged when the drying process is completed. Alas, orchids, violets, azaleas and others succulent flowers They lose their color brightness very much and can almost become discolored. Treatment with denatured alcohol will preserve more color source material. Don't be afraid of disappointments, experiment.

Drying plants for herbarium

There are only a few proven and easy-to-use methods for drying plants for herbarium at home. We don't need any for them. special conditions and devices.

• Drying plant material between books . Collect the thickest books you have in your house. Place a sheet of white, porous paper into one of them. Carefully place the plant on it after straightening it. Place another sheet of paper on top. Then, carefully close the book. Create a press on top using the remaining books. Every 3-4 days, open the book and change the backing sheets to keep them dry. For drying succulent plants with thick stems it will take up to a month.
• Drying plants with an iron . Everyone is probably familiar with this simplest method. Children usually go to school or kindergarten dried with an iron autumn leaves. This method is good because it allows you to dry the plant very quickly. Although in the process heat treatment The final color of the herbarium may change. Before using the iron, the plant should be slightly pressed in a book to give it a fixed shape. After which, the plant laid between two porous sheets is ironed on a flat surface. Use an iron heated to minimum temperatures. Treatment should be gradual and as gentle as possible.
• Microwave drying . To do this, the plant is placed in a book. The book is placed in the microwave and turned on for 1 minute. At the end of time, you can see how it changes appearance material. The process is continued until the plant is completely dry. It is important to carry out drying in stages, allowing the plant to cool in the air and allowing the moisture to evaporate.

Experienced creators of decorative herbariums, for whom this process has become a favorite hobby, can purchase a flower press.

Remove flowers, leaves and plant parts very carefully and slowly. Using tweezers.

How to make a herbarium?

After the process of preparing the material is completed, the most interesting point in the creation of a herbarium. From additional materials we may need:

• Thick cardboard
• Porous paper or watercolor paper
• PVA glue
• Glue for fixing plants (colorless)
• Tweezers
• Scissors
• Scotch
• Glue for decoupage

It is very important to have a clearly thought out idea for creating a decorative herbarium. Plants are very fragile and all manipulations with them must be as precise as possible. On herbarium sheets plants are not glued. Traditionally, they are fixed with tape or strips of paper.

Fix the plants on the base step by step. The plants are glued first, and lastly the inscriptions and labels.

Finished herbariums should be protected from dust high humidity air.

September is just around the corner, and it's very... good time in order to introduce your child to what a plant herbarium is. In dry scientific language, a herbarium is tutorial, in which plant samples with roots, leaves and fruits are collected. We invite you and your children to look at this activity from a different, creative angle. In this article, we will teach you how to make a herbarium yourself, and also give recommendations on collecting, drying and decorating the herbarium, so that the results of this work will delight your family for a long time!

DIY herbarium

So, how to make a herbarium with your own hands? The whole process can be divided into 3 stages:

• collection of plants;
• preparation for drying and the actual drying of plants;
• design of the herbarium in the required form.

Our adventure begins with a preparatory moment - we recommend that you purchase a beautiful and entertaining encyclopedia about plants, in which your child will look for information about the plants and shrubs, the leaves and flowers of which he will collect.

Now let's start collecting. It is best to go for your finds to a forest or park on a fine sunny day at 11 am, when the dew has already dried, since wet leaves are much more difficult to dry, they are more fragile and difficult to further manipulate. Let your child collect everything he likes: leaves, flowers, buds, seeds, spikelets, inflorescences and petals, even roots! We are not creating a strict school herbarium, but an entertaining and exciting one! So prepare more bags for your plant “treasures”. Try to find several copies of the same plant materials in case of breakage or unsuccessful drying, as well as in order to decorate a beautiful panel from paired decorative elements.

Having collected the material, you need to think about how to make a herbarium. The next stage is drying collected material. Regardless of which method you use, all found flower leaves need to be cleared of soil, damaged leaves should be removed, and the resulting elements should be thoroughly straightened so that they take the desired shape for drying.

There are as many as 5 ways to dry plants for a herbarium! The simplest is to purchase a clever special press for a herbarium at an art store or something like that. All subsequent methods are purely home methods. So, you can make a herbarium, armed with tablets, tracing paper, newspapers, parchment and a stack of books. To do this, you need to cover the table with newspaper, lay the plants on it, cover them with tracing paper or parchment paper on top, put planks on top of all this and pile stacks of heavy books on top of this structure. The entire drying process will take 1 - 2 weeks, but to speed it up, change the paper that covers the plants every 2-3 days. Be very careful not to damage your exhibits!

Second home method– the fastest and most dangerous is drying plants with an iron. However, this method is good if you don't need to save natural color plants. Take a lukewarm iron and iron the leaves 3-4 times at intervals of several hours to prevent them from drying out.

The third method is similar to the second - it is dried in the microwave. The good thing is that everything happens quickly. The disadvantage is that the leaves almost always curl up, making them difficult to glue.

The fourth method is to dry the plants in glycerin, but be prepared for the fact that your plants will turn greenish-brown in color, but they will retain their shape perfectly. Buy glycerin at the pharmacy, dilute it in hot water in a ratio of 1:3, fill a container 6-10 cm with this solution, lower the plants strictly vertically and leave for several days until the plants darken, then air dry them.

There are a couple of tricks in making a herbarium:

• To make the leaves denser, dip them in a 20% PVA glue solution before drying.
• Flower buds are dried in sand poured into a box.
• To preserve the leaves of dove-blue or of blue color, dip them in denatured alcohol for 1 minute.

How to design a herbarium

After the plants have dried, it's time to think about the creative question of how to design a herbarium? The answer to this depends on your goals. If you are making a herbarium for school, then most likely you have already been given strict rules on how to properly make a herbarium, what should be in it and how all this should be decorated. We will talk to you about the design of your homemade products together with your child.

The traditional way of design is a herbarium album. In this form you will submit the herbarium for inspection at school. However, you can liven it up, for example, by making not an ordinary folder, but by decorating the herbarium in a photo album, making funny inscriptions with interesting facts O collected plants, which your baby will find in a pre-purchased encyclopedia. A photo album will not require any effort from you at all: you just need to put not photographs under the film, but dried plants and labels with signatures. Or you can combine the herbarium with a thematic photo album, you will get a real family heirloom!

If you want to do something traditional, but still unusual, we suggest you a folding book. In this case, the herbarium sheet is drawn up in accordance with standard requirements: the exhibit is located in the middle of the sheet, and the name of the plant and the family to which it belongs, information about the place and time of collection of the plant is written in the lower right corner. For a change, write down the ones you know. medicinal properties plants.

It will be very beautiful if you do it yourself decorative panel or bookmarks using your dried plants. Take cardboard, fabric, or canvas glued to cardboard. And give free rein to your imagination! To make such a panel you will need regular PVA glue, paints, brushes, etc. After you have pasted your application, it should be left for 24 hours under a press of boards and books, and then you can insert the masterpiece into a frame.

You can also use dried plants to decorate Greeting Cards, covers of notebooks, notepads, books, and photo albums. And remember that in a herbarium the main thing is the process! So arm yourself good mood, scoop, bags - and forward to nature. A good day with your children is guaranteed!