Explore the World from Home with Botanical Beads
(Page 2 of 5)
December/January 2006
By Susan Belsinger
Botanical beads do not arrive only on the sea. They’re literally everywhere. Smith’s collection consists of seeds, fruits, capsules, nuts, stems, rhizomes (the underground stem of a plant), arils (seed appendages), powdered wood (such as sandalwood) and the fragrant powdered seed of a North African tree, Detarium microcarpum. Dried and powdered rose petals can be used to make rose beads. (However, Smith’s rosebead-making Potomac Unit of the Herb Society of America prefers to make them with whole petals cooked down into a mash, then rolled into beads.) Beads made from powders, whether derived from wood, seeds, spices, flowers or herbs, are sometimes held together with a substance such as gum mastic or tragacanth.
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Little Collections Grow and Grow
Smith became interested in botanical beads while living in Thailand with her husband Ed back in the ’70s. There, she picked up her first botanical bead necklace, a beautiful strand of red seeds (Adanenthera pavonina). Her collection began some serious expansion during the 1980s when Ed went birding in South America and brought back seed necklaces. As her collection and interest grew, she asked traveling friends to be on the lookout for seed necklaces, and kept an eye out for any she could find locally. (She advises putting any beads or seeds from other countries in the freezer for a week or two to kill any potential infestation from insects or other voyagers.)
As her seed collection began to grow, Smith realized that her biggest challenge by far would be the difficult task of identifying seeds that already have been altered by cutting or chiseling. She contacted many museums and botanical gardens for help. She hit pay dirt with Charles Gunn and Joseph Kirkbride, Jr. at the U.S. National Seed Herbarium in Beltsville, Maryland; at Kew Gardens in London; and with Robert Faden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Once they’d helped her put a name to the seed in question, off she would go to the Library of Congress to sleuth and learn.
Over the years, Smith’s collection has grown to hundreds of necklaces. She has cataloged each item in a three-ring binder that includes not only photographs and her own description of each item, but also the history and lore that she has researched on all the botanical beads in her collection. She currently is working on getting the contents onto a website (See “For more information”). This year, she decided to part with most of her collection and has donated more than 150 necklaces to Kew Gardens, which will exhibit them in the future. The curator there told Smith that the addition of her botanical beads will elevate Kew’s already wonderful collection to a superb one. The Claude E. Phillips Herbarium at the University of Delaware now houses almost 200 of Smith’s necklaces.
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