Est. 1911 · Catalog of botanical anomalies
Some are wrong in kind ways. The Conservatory keeps, sequences and quietly worries about the specimens that botany would rather not file.
Fig. 1 — Widow's Fern, H-0117
Two wings
Pressed, dried, and archived. Plants whose genomes contain things they should not — encoded text, extinct genes, the occasional human being. Handle with gloves and a steady mind.
Browse the wingThe living collection. Plants that are just as impossible, but lean towards kindness — seeds that mend, vines that remember, flowers that open for the grieving.
Browse the wingFrom the drawers
A few sheets the curators have pulled out for visitors this season. Each one has a story the lab could not quite explain.
Hedera reparans
A climbing ivy that slowly repairs whatever it grows over — cracked pots, torn paper, once a broken wrist.
Polypodium memorans
An ordinary fern whose fronds uncurl only near the recently bereaved — and whose genome remembers who was lost.
Bryum vesperale
A cushion moss that photosynthesises from attention rather than light, and dies in rooms nobody visits.
The catalog is written by its readers. Read the field guide, press your specimen into the template, and send it to the curators.