Collapsed Calyx, Drawer Fourteen

This is a single dried sepal from a herbarium Silene specimen, mounted sometime in the 1880s and never revisited. I worked at roughly 8× the original scale, letting the watercolor pool into the papery hollows while the ink traced every longitudinal nerve and the faint rectangular ghost the mounting tissue left behind. The collector's penciled annotation — just a location and a date — bleeds into the lower margin, part of the composition now whether I intended it or not.