How to make a water plant community with children?

Making a Herbarium is a creative, fun, eco-friendly and easy-to-implement activity. It's perfect for keeping children occupied at weekends or during holidays, while introducing them to botany. When and how to harvest and dry leaves or flowers, how to easily create a lovely notebook and stick the dried plants inside? Discover in our step-by-step tutorial how to create a herbarium for children of all ages!

Harvesting Plants

Collecting the leaves and flowers that will make up your herbarium is the most important step.

The Best Time and Places to Gather Specimens

Ideally, choose a sunny, dry day when it hasn't rained for several days to go searching for flowers and leaves to fill your herbarium. The drier the leaves or flowers are when picked, the shorter the drying time will be later. Spring and summer offer charming flowers to collect, while autumn days are perfect for gathering pretty coloured leaves of different sizes and shapes.

Make the most of a family nature walk: a stroll through a forest or along a watercourse, where you'll find no shortage of opportunities to discover all sorts of vegetation. You don't necessarily need to travel far to find perfectly suitable spots, but always respect private property, nature reserves and protected areas. A trip to the garden or local park can also suffice, especially with younger children.

Remember to bring secateurs or, failing that, a pair of scissors to neatly cut leaves and flowers without pulling them off. Also bring a basket or small paper bags to store your harvest gradually without crushing the most delicate specimens.

With children, gathering tree leaves and flowers can be accompanied by several learning opportunities. It's a chance to talk about the life of a leaf: how it's born and grows, how it dies and falls, then how it can be recycled afterwards. With older children, you can take the opportunity to identify different leaves and flowers you collect. To help, look for a guide with precise descriptions for identification: you can then take time to observe your specimens to determine which plants they come from. If you don't have a suitable book, you can also use smartphone apps to identify plants.

Where possible, gather leaves and flowers that are thin and small enough to fit in a herbarium. In any case, look for the best-formed specimens that deserve a place in your herbarium.

→ For the notebook-making stage suggested below, you'll also need to find some small, fairly sturdy and straight wooden twigs.

Multiple Walks to Learn More

Generally, a single outdoor walk isn't enough to create a leaf or flower herbarium. It can be useful to visit different sites to vary the species, and to go out in different seasons to further diversify your collection. Each time, you have a new opportunity to awaken children to nature, teach them to observe, disconnect from screens and live in greater harmony with their environment.

Drying Flowers and Leaves

What You Need to Dry Your Harvest

• the leaves and flowers from your harvest
• sheets of newspaper or kitchen paper
• a heavy object like a wooden board, large book or, if you have one, a flower press

Step-by-Step Drying of Flowers and Leaves:

• As soon as you return from your nature walk, sort through your harvest: remove damaged specimens, trim excess leaves from flower stems...

• Arrange the leaves and flowers to dry between two sheets of newspaper or kitchen paper, without overlapping them. Space them a few centimetres apart to prevent them sticking together as they dry

• Place the heavy object on top: this weight will flatten your plants. If space is limited, you can layer different sheets of paper containing your specimens or place them between the pages of a large book. Be careful that leaves and flowers stay in place when closing the pages, and watch out for possible stains in your book (sap, water, flower pigments, mould...).

Allow between two and three weeks for optimal drying. Don't underestimate this stage: depending on the plant species, some leaves take longer to dry than others. For good preservation, leaves must be completely dry. During drying time, check the plants regularly: if you see signs of mould, change the newspaper or absorbent paper to avoid moisture build-up.

Making the Herbarium

The work following the harvest of leaves and flowers is just as exciting... for children and the adults accompanying them! You can create and decorate a notebook together and prepare spaces to stick the dried leaves and flowers. For example, a "four seasons" herbarium is particularly interesting: you insert leaves and flowers gathered over the months and thus see the vegetation's evolution. You could make a herbarium on the theme of wildflowers, "flowers from my garden" to preserve their memory, or an autumn herbarium with all the shades of autumn colours. If you want to break from traditional herbariums, nothing stops you presenting yours in a "mixed-up" style, according to your children's creativity.

What You Need to Make Your Herbarium

I suggest making a personalised "homemade" herbarium to stimulate creativity, easy to do even with very young children and requiring minimal materials. Depending on the children's ages, they may just need help with the notebook assembly stages.

• thick A4 paper (like Canson)
• sticky tape to attach dried leaves and flowers in your notebook. This can be plain or decorative (like scrapbooking tape)
• a hole punch
• felt-tip pens and/or coloured pencils
• raffia or string
• the twigs gathered on your walk
• secateurs

Step-by-Step Herbarium Making:

• Fold the A4 sheets in half and cut them along the fold into two equal pieces. The number of sheets depends on what you have available and/or how many you want in your herbarium (about ten is enough to keep children occupied without tiring them)

• Gather the sheets together
• Punch 2 small holes on the left edge of your half-sheets (all in the same place) using the hole punch (work with two small batches if the stack is too thick)
• Use your secateurs to cut a twig to the vertical size of the sheets
• Attach the twig to the sheets by threading raffia or string through the holes in the sheets. Tie secure knots, but not too tight so you can easily turn the pages of your herbarium
• Start by asking children to choose a title for their herbarium and make a nice cover, according to their inspiration: "my garden herbarium", "[child's name]'s herbarium", etc.

• You can then proceed to stick the dried leaves and flowers according to your chosen theme... or freely! Attach them with small pieces of sticky tape, transparent or decorative, following the children's inspiration. Help them understand that the result shouldn't be too cluttered, but should showcase their beautiful flowers and leaves.

• If you've identified your specimens, have your children write their names underneath or beside them. It's fun to note that some plants have rather strange names like "Snapdragon", "Goat's Beard" or "Ginkgo"!

Ready-Made Notebooks to Guide the Creation Process

If you're short on inspiration, time or materials, you can quite easily find herbarium notebooks online or simply buy pretty little blank notebooks and take inspiration from existing models to prepare your own.

Ready-made herbarium notebooks, often designed with care for aesthetics and presentation, will encourage children to take pride in their work. These can be found in various specialist shops. They'll suggest leaves to collect and goals to achieve, which can be both motivating and educational. They may also include spaces to add information about gathered leaves or flowers, making the activity as enriching as possible!