Construction

These are three Riker Boxes completed this year, including Female American
Pokeweed, Beach Plum, and Common Reed. 

This marking period, the plant pressing team and I completed 10 the Riker Boxes for ten plant specimens. We followed our plan of procedures for mounting and labeling the plants. Please refer to Construction Pictures for documentation of each stage of the process. 

Botanical field guides used in
identifying specimens

Gluing the back label
onto the Riker box
using spray adhesive

We began this year with plant presses full of specimens and began mounting them in individual Riker boxes. We had about twenty specimens in Riker boxes unidentified. We identified them using our field guides. After they had been identified, I began researching the labels. The University of Texas at Austin has a Herbarium with an online Plant Resources Center. This where I found a lot of the information listed on my labels. The General Characteristics on the back labels concerning specimen color or leaf arrangement/shape is derived from the field guides in our lab.

The labels are typed into a template I created in Microsoft Word. The font of the main front label is Poor Richard. All other text is in Times New Roman font. After the information has been researched and the labels have been typed, they are reviewed. The labels are checked for content, along with grammatical and technical errors. Once they are proofread and verified, they are printed. The back label is laminated and attached to the back of the Riker box with our spray adhesive. We completed this entire process ten times this year in order to create specimens that are accurate, accessible and informative. 

After our visit to the Chrysler Herbarium at Rutgers University, we took greater care in the mounting of the specimens in the Riker boxes. Many of them had already been pressed with special features displayed separately and with roots. We made sure we included as much of the specimens as possible during the mounting process. One change we made, as directed by Ms. Lauren Spitz, was to bend the stems of the plants rather than cutting them. 

When faced with three Riker boxes all containing the same specimen, we were able to come to a more informed conclusion about which specimen to keep. We took features from each of the three boxes and consolidated the plant into one Riker box. The plant is still unidentified.