PHOTO: NICK DENTAMARO

The Brown community had primarily set down flowers at two main locations on campus: the Van Wickle Gates and the Infinite Possibility sundial outside Barus & Holley, the building where the shooting took place. Samples of those flowers are now at the Brown University Herbarium, preserved for future generations.

“[The shooting] will change Brown in many ways, some of which we can’t comprehend right now,” said Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Matthew Guterl, who, along with Rebecca Kartzinel, the director of the Brown University Herbarium and an assistant teaching professor of biology, organized the preservation effort.

PHOTO: NICK DENTAMARO

After delicately picking through the frozen bouquets to find flowers that would press well, Kartzinel brought the samples back to her office. She chose flowers that seemed likely to “keep their integrity as they thawed, which included chrysanthemums, peonies, baby’s breath, statice, lavender, and more,” she said. “We took single stems from different bouquets to show the variety of flowers people had left.”

There was something stabilizing, Kartzinel said, about being back at her workspace in the herbarium. The routine was familiar. She knew the steps to take to press the flowers, to preserve their figures, to hold them, in Guterl’s words, “in trust for the community.”

Kartzinel is an expert with plants and preservation, but she thinks of flower pressing as a universal type of memorialization. “So many people do this as children,” she said. “This is a process that everyone is familiar with. We save things that are important to us.”

Students and community members continue to leave flowers across campus. Kartzinel called the number of bouquets that have been left “extraordinary,” and hopes the Brown community finds comfort in the permanence of the preservation of some of those flowers, “something beyond photos.”

PHOTO: NICK DENTAMARO

Preserving the flowers is “the University honoring the true deep bonds of friendship and love across campus that caused students to organically show up in any way that they could,” she said.

The week of the shooting, Martinez’s younger sister received an early- decision acceptance to Brown. Martinez asked her sister if, because of what had just happened, she regretted applying early.

Martinez said that her sister replied: “I could never regret this. The way I’ve seen your friends respond and the way you talk about Brown makes me even more inspired to become part of this community.”

When tragedy struck Brown’s campus and words, as Martinez put it, felt “obsolete,” the bouquets, the notes, and the objects said what words could not.

“By putting those flowers outside the Van Wickle Gates, we were providing a sense of life for the two souls that are never going to walk back through those gates,” Martinez said. “I like the idea that instead of letting those flowers die, we get to hold on to them forever.”

The flower pressing effort is part of the Brown Ever True healing and recovery initiative, a campus-wide project bringing together resources, programming, and services focused on mental health, psychological wellness, and ensuring a strong sense of community for faculty, staff, and students in the aftermath of December 13. Brown University President Christina H. Paxson recently charged a committee to make recommendations for a permanent campus memorial.­­­