The Institute

The Conservatory was founded in 1911 by a society of amateur botanists who kept finding the same fern in places it could not have reached. They pressed it, labelled it, and filed it under H-0001. The drawer has been opened many times since. The fern is not always in it.

Today the Institute keeps two collections:

• The Herbarium — pressed and archived specimens whose genomes contain things they should not. Most are harmless once dried. Most.
• The Glasshouse — living specimens that are equally impossible, but which seem, on balance, to be on our side.

Every specimen is sequenced. That is where the trouble usually starts: plant DNA does not normally contain fragments of the collector's late wife, or a short message in base-four, or bases that are neither A, C, G nor T.

How a sheet is written

Each entry in the catalog follows the same form — a herbarium label, a lab report, and a curator's note. The tone is calm, precise, and a little tired. The horror (or the kindness) is in the details, not the adjectives.

About this site

The Conservatory is a work of collaborative fiction. The Institute, its curators, its collectors and every specimen in the catalog are invented — no plant here exists, and no real person is described. New entries are written to the house style and reviewed before they are filed; contributions are welcome under CC BY-SA 4.0.