Pressed plants and printed lists, one sheet at a time

Fernbank is the photographic archive of a volunteer society that has been copying botanical material since 2011. We hold 61,400 master images at the time of writing. Most show herbarium sheets: ferns, grasses and sedges pressed flat, mounted on card and labelled in ink, many of them gathered from fen edges and river meadows between 1860 and 1930.

The second collection is seed catalogues. Nurseries printed lists every spring and autumn, and the society holds 214 of them, dated 1880 to 1960, scanned page by page on a copy stand. Nothing in the set has been run through text recognition. Each list is indexed by hand: issue, page count, number of plates, and the nursery's own page numbers.

Work happens on Saturday mornings and on two evenings a week in the society's rooms above a bakery. The rota is short, so most entries carry the initials of the person who photographed them and the date the photograph was taken.

What is here

Herbarium sheets

530 sheets in two sections, ferns and grasses with sedges. Start at the sheets page.

Seed catalogues

214 printed issues, indexed by year and by nursery.

The society

Who runs the archive, how the rota works, and how the rooms are used.

Reading the reference numbers

Every item has a reference beginning FB. The next letter is the collection, S for sheets and C for catalogues. A full number looks like FB-S-F-0031: the S is the collection, the F is the section, and 0031 is the item. The working methods page explains the rest.

Sizes

Master files are large. One herbarium sheet photographed at full resolution is between 1.8 and 3.4 GB. A folio of sixty sheets comes to around 120 GB, and the sedge set runs to more than 400 GB. Every entry gives format and size before anything else, so a reader knows what an item weighs before reading about it.