How to collect and press wildflowers in the Southwest

Field Notes, Edition 2

A Guide to Pressing Wildflowers

Get the free 27-page guide to collecting, pressing, labeling, and mounting wildflowers — plus when and where to find them across the Southwest.

For collectors, nature lovers, and anyone who wants to understand what’s growing around them.

WHAT’S INSIDE:

  • When and where Southwest wildflowers bloom — six elevation zones, February through October

  • How to collect without damaging a population

  • The full pressing process, including plants specific tips

  • How to write a label that still means something in a hundred years

  • Mounting, framing, and displaying your work

  • A living appendix of pressing notes by species, updated every season

COVER.jpg
Contents page listing chapters on herbaria, flowering windows of the Southwest, responsible collecting, pressing, labeling, mounting, and display.
Guide page titled Learning to See: Flowering Windows of the Southwest, with desert buckwheat blooming under a double rainbow.
Guide page on mounting supplies — archival paper, pH-neutral glue, and linen tape — with a pressed lupine on a work table.
Guide page showing three framed pressed specimens on handmade paper — a purple mariposa lily and two smaller botanical pieces.
Guide page on framing pressed flowers, showing a framed paintbrush specimen surrounded by scissors, tweezers, and loose pressed

A LIVING GUIDE

A penstemon and a paintbrush need almost opposite handling. The only way to learn that is to press both and take note of what happened, which I've been doing since I started.

Those notes live on the website rather than in the guide, because a printed list is finished the day it goes to press and mine isn't — I add to it every season. The guide includes a few samples, and the link to the rest.