Leaves between the pages

An original literary non-fiction-style account of examining a collection of pressed plants during a public archive visit.

The drawer opened with a small resistance, then came forward so easily that I caught its edge with both hands. Inside were sheets of cream paper, each carrying a plant made almost flat. Stems crossed the pages like routes on an unfamiliar map. A leaf had folded over itself before drying, leaving a dark triangle where the rest was pale.

I had expected these specimens to look identical in their stillness. Instead, each had retained a different inconvenience. One stem refused the straight line of the page. Another plant spread into the margin, where a careful hand had added a separate strip of support. The labels were square; the leaves were not.

Beneath one specimen, the collector had written a date and a place. The ink was narrow and unusually firm. Next to it, in lighter pencil, somebody had added a question mark. Two kinds of certainty occupied the same small space. I could read the date easily, but I could not reconstruct the afternoon in which the plant had been found, or the later doubt which had settled beside its name.

The archivist slid the sheet back beneath its neighbour. For a moment, one curled leaf caught the light and seemed thicker than the rest, a little pocket of shadow refusing to be pressed out. Then the paper covered it. The drawer closed. Outside, ordinary leaves moved above the pavement, too numerous and too briefly seen for any label to hold them all.

How does the writer use language to explore the relationship between the plants and the attempt to record them?