4th November, 1847.
A day of soft, grey light, perfectly suited for the quiet industry of the study. With the last of the autumn specimens pressed and dried, I have undertaken the necessary audit of my herbarium—a census, one might say, of my silent parishioners. Each folio is a small, flat tomb, but one that preserves a truth more lasting than any stone monument.
I spent the morning reviewing the collection from ‘45. The colours, I note with a familiar pang of melancholy, have begun their inevitable retreat from vibrancy into the muted browns and ochres of memory. The brilliant blue of a cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) becomes a ghost of itself, its identity preserved only by the careful script of its label. Without that small anchor of ink, it would be just another brittle, anonymous form.
It is this unwavering identity of the specimen that I find so profoundly satisfying. This dried sprig of thyme will always be Thymus polytrichus. It will not, in a fit of fashionable pique, declare itself a rose, nor will it attend a darkened parlour to channel the spirit of a long-departed thistle. It is precisely what it is, and the herbarium is a testament to that honest, unyielding fact.
My review has revealed a rather shameful gap in my collection concerning the ferns and their allies—the Pteridophyta. While the fern-collecting craze seems to have seized the nation’s drawing-rooms, with young ladies risking their ankles on treacherous slopes for the most common spleenwort, my own collection lacks system. I have resolved to rectify this. Come spring, I shall begin a methodical survey of the damp woods and shaded limestone cloughs of the Mendips. It will be a study not of fashionable trophies, but of the intricate, ancient geometry of spore and frond.
The world of men is a maelstrom of shifting beliefs and declared allegiances. My herbarium is my bulwark against it—a library of facts, where each entry is verified, classified, and immune to the whims of opinion. It will, I trust, outlast me.
Curator’s Note
This entry is particularly poignant for the modern archivist, as the herbarium he describes with such care and affection has not survived. Aside from a few pressed flowers found between the pages of his letters to Mrs. Finch, Bennet’s entire physical collection of botanical specimens was likely lost or disposed of in the years after his death. The fire that damaged parts of The Larches in the early 20th century is the most probable culprit. His journal, therefore, is the ghost of a ghost—a written record of a physical record that is itself gone.
His planned survey of ferns is historically significant. The “fern craze,” or Pteridomania, was a genuine Victorian phenomenon, peaking in the 1850s. Bennet, characteristically, approaches the topic not as a fashionable hobbyist but as a systematic naturalist, disdaining the “trophy-hunting” aspect of the popular craze.
The final lines are a powerful statement of his worldview. For Bennet, the act of collecting and classifying was not merely a scientific pastime; it was a philosophical necessity. The herbarium was his meticulously ordered counter-argument to the chaos and irrationality he perceived in the human world. That this “bulwark” of facts has vanished makes the survival of his written thoughts all the more precious. - Dr. E. Reed