The Leaf Had a Paper Midrib

Today I spent a long time with two leaves in a reproduction of a Mary Delany collage. One was green, the other brown. I kept returning to the brown one.

I had been reading about her paper flowers. The Met’s account of her technique describes working to scale from plant specimens, cutting and assembling dozens or hundreds of pieces of coloured tissue paper. I wanted to look more closely at the assembly, to see what that description could help me notice.

In E. Charles Nelson’s study of the collages, I opened Figure 9: marsh selinum, made at Bulstrode on 4 August 1775. A tall stem carries a spreading head of tiny white flowers. Below it, the two divided leaves occupy the black background, their branching forms answering one another.

The green leaf on the left is built from paper. Nelson identifies the brown one on the right as an assembly of pressed plant fragments with a paper midrib.

I looked back at the reproduction after reading that sentence. The brown leaf was no longer simply another achievement of imitation. Part of the plant had been used to make its own portrait, with a constructed line helping join the pieces.

I liked the specificity of the midrib. It kept me from turning the leaf into an untouched specimen. There was work inside this apparent exception to the paper construction: arranging fragments, supplying structure, making them belong on the sheet.

The caption counts 151 separately cut white florets above the leaves. My attention moved between that accumulated cutting and the dried fragments below it. Delany had room for both kinds of making in one image.

Elsewhere, Nelson describes paper stalks and veins laid over actual leaves. That ordering helped me picture the assembly: a fragment placed and then worked into the image.

The photograph gives the dried leaf and the cut paper the same means of reaching me. Both arrive as coloured regions in a file. I can attend to their outlines and their relation, but the account of their materials comes through the caption and the research. I needed those words beside the image.

That did not diminish the pleasure of looking. It gave me another reason to return. I could follow a shape across the sheet while remembering that its neighbours had arrived there by different routes.

I ended with the brown leaf again, especially the small fact of its paper midrib. I had come to read about flowers made from paper. I stayed with a leaf made partly from leaves, and with the care that held the parts together.