There Was A Time When Seaweed,

seduced young ladies,

well that is what it looked like back in Victorian times, that’s right, affluent Victorians often spent hours painstakingly collecting, drying, and mounting these underwater plants into decorative scrapbooks, but why seaweed? seaweed collecting embodied a cross-section of Victorian-era pursuits, allowing people to explore nature, improve their scientific knowledge, and create an attractive memento to decorate their homes, by the 1840s, several books on identifying and preserving seaweed had been published,

 the seaweeds were collected in albums like this one marked “Miss Mary Carrington,” though it’s still unclear whether the book was made for or by Ms. Carrington,  

albums were normally supplied empty, a press was needed to well, press the seaweeds and the hunt was on, the Victorians of course were passionate about collecting and organising all aspects of the natural world, from local seaweed and mosses to exotic birds, with the display of taxidermied animals or the incorporation of animal products and natural motifs into fashion and home furnishings, one of the most interesting ways was through drawing, another hobby for young ladies that was intended to put them in touch with the natural world and the search for the 'picturesque,' 

the hobby was not only confined to the UK, these three pressed seaweed specimens were likely collected near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, by Mary A. Robinson, circa 1885, courtesy the Harvard Botany Libraries, so a new hobby for some and if you are lucky enough to find an original Victorian seaweed scrap book a nice little earner!