The Language of Leaves

Reading the Pressed Silences

In the archives of science, there are documents that speak — but only if we know how to listen. Herbarium sheets. Field journals. Marginal annotations in fading graphite or ink.

Let's take herbaria. At first glance, they appear precise: plants pressed flat with anatomical parts exposed, labeled in Latin, tagged with coordinates and collectors' names, catalogued and indexed with a librarian's discipline.

But these are not just botanical records. They are epistemic artifacts, sedimented with power. Each leaf carries more than the memory of photosynthesis — it bears traces of conversations erased, names unrecorded, and knowledges misframed or forcibly translated.

They are, in short, documents with absences.

These absences are not incidental. They are structured. Archival theorists like Verne Harris have long reminded us that archives are spaces of both memory and forgetting — and that forgetting is often an act of power. When applied to colonial science, this insight demands that we treat every herbarium sheet (and every field journal, and every...) as a site of epistemic tension: what is preserved, what is omitted, and who gets to speak.

Taxonomy as Epistemic Violence

To name is to claim. To rename is to erase.

Linnaean taxonomy, imported into the tropics under the banner of Enlightenment science, promised universal classification. But it arrived as a colonial language — a system that catalogued the world through Latinized binomials, disembedding plants from their social, ritual, and ecological contexts.

Plants with deep meaning and millennia of use were renamed as if they had no history. Uncaria tomentosa, Tabebuia rosea, Psidium guajava — each assigned a Latin tag that masked the hundreds of local names, cosmologies, and practices they were embedded in. In this re-labelling, knowledge was not just translated — it was flattened.

What gets recorded as scientific fact often begins with epistemic theft: the extraction of a plant, the suppression of its native name, and the recontextualization of its use through European pharmacological frameworks. This act is framed as "discovery" — but it is, more accurately, a re-inscription. The local is renamed. The foreign becomes authoritative. The process is not merely linguistic — it is ontological.

Margins and Silences: The Ghosts of Fieldwork

Nowhere is this flattening more visible than in the margins.

Across hundreds of field notebooks from the 18th to the early 20th century, the figure of the "native informant" appears as a cipher. Often reduced to a brief note —"native says bark used for fever"— their identities, languages, relationships to the plant, and modes of transmission are omitted.

These are not trivial details. They are epistemological losses.

Who spoke those words? Were they a healer? A midwife? Did they sing the name of the plant, or chant its use? Was the plant harvested with a ritual, a taboo, a song? All of this disappears under a single line of functionalist data. The oral and the embodied are reduced to the anecdotal.

Such omissions are not accidental. They reflect the "epistemic habits of empire": the tendency to privilege inscription over orality, system over relation, and European accreditation over Indigenous expertise. In this framework, field journals preserve only the fragments that could be assimilated into Western categories. The rest —the messy, rich, relational knowledge— is silenced.

Violence in the Record

We often speak of archives as neutral spaces. They are not. They are curated, constructed, and policed.

Many herbarium specimens still bear the names of colonial officials, slave traders, or European aristocrats who funded expeditions — despite having had no direct contact with the landscapes or species collected. Others reflect outright mockery or racism: plants named with caricatures of local expressions, jokes in Latin, or patronizing labels. These names persist in global taxonomic databases, embedded in the so-called neutral language of science.

Even the instruments of scientific collection —the press, the label, the catalog— enforce a certain violence. The plant is flattened, desiccated, detached from its ecosystem, ritual, and narrative. Its new name is inscribed on imported paper, in imported ink, stored in institutions far removed from its territory.

The archive is complete — and hollow.

Toward Epistemic Reannotation

But what if we could annotate backwards?

Today, decolonial movements in ethnobotany, museology, and archival science are beginning to challenge these epistemic fractures. Some community-led projects are reattaching original names to specimens. Others are incorporating oral history, sensory memory, and ritual knowledge as metadata. New archival interfaces allow for multiple layers of annotation — including those written by descendants of the communities from which the plants were taken.

These are not simple acts of "inclusion." They are confrontations with the structure of the archive itself. They ask: Can we make room for knowledge that doesn't fit bibliographic or scientific norms? Can an annotation contain a chant? Can a catalog entry carry a cosmology?

To press a plant into an herbarium sheet was to make it legible to the empire. To re-annotate that sheet is to make it legible —again— to its people.

Toward a Botanical Justice

The leaves still speak.

Their pressed veins mirror rivers. Their names whisper in forgotten tongues. Their uses echo through kitchens, healers' hands, and sacred rituals. But to hear them, we must be willing to read differently — to treat the herbarium not just as a storage of data, but as a field of erasure and possibility.

What if we trained future botanists as archivists of memory as much as taxonomists? What if libraries held collections of plant stories, not just their dried parts? What if metadata frameworks allowed for multiple truths — not as contradictions, but as coexisting logics?

The herbarium, like the archive, is not dead. It can be a site of repair. But only if we unlearn the myth of scientific neutrality and listen to what has been pressed out of the page.

The language of leaves was never silent. It was just mistranslated.

  This chronicle is echoed in the blog post "Broken Taxonomies," where the same topic is explored from a librarian's point of view.