We are excited to share Herbaria 3.0, a new website featuring the intertwined stories of plants and people. Plants are everywhere, and everyone has a story to tell about a plant. Our website offers a collaborative place for sharing your story and reading the stories of others. You can access the website at www.herbaria3.org and you can follow the project on Instagram @herbaria3.0.

Herbaria 3.0 emerged in part to counter an epidemic of “plant blindness,” or the inability to seethe plants that surround our everyday lives. Without recognizing the plants around us, we cannot recognize that plants are essential: they give us medicines and metaphors, gardens and garlands, perfumes and poetry. Yet plants are not just objects for our fascination or use: they have their own wants, needs, and desires. They exhibit complex behaviors in response to equally complex stimuli. Plants exist in a world of complex relationships that are often hidden from human view.

On our site, you’ll find writing prompts that can help guide you in writing your own story. You’ll also find a shortcut tool that enables you to upload a photo of a plant and answer just a few questions about the photo. You can also read more about our name and what our rebooted “Herbaria 3.0” is all about.

Herbaria 3.0 is a collaborative digital environmental humanities project led by a team of researchers in different academic fields in the United States and Sweden. The website is open access and nonprofit. Its development in this pilot stage was supported by a grant from the Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory of Linköping University, Sweden, in turn funded by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, and Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development.

For more information or for press materials, please contact us at herbaria3@gmail.com.