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A Field Guide to Real and Imaginary Plants
The Herbarium is a field guide to plants both real and imagined. Enter any plant name - common, scientific, or entirely invented - and receive a detailed entry about its characteristics, habitat, uses, and folklore.
Each plant name generates a deterministic entry based on the name itself and today's date. The same plant queried on the same day will always produce the same entry. Tomorrow, the same name may reveal different aspects of the same plant - new uses discovered, folklore variants recorded, seasonal observations noted.
Herbals - books describing plants and their properties - have existed since antiquity. The earliest known herbal is the Ebers Papyrus from Egypt, circa 1550 BCE. Medieval herbals mixed careful observation with folklore, attributing magical properties alongside medicinal ones.
This herbarium continues that tradition. Every entry contains elements of truth (plants do have scientific names, they do grow in habitats, they are used by people) arranged around a center that may or may not exist. Is Moonwort real? Yes - it's a small fern, Botrychium lunaria. Is the Moonwort described here the same plant? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
The Herbarium pairs well with other nature-focused corners of this site: