Immediately after tragedy struck Brown University on Dec. 13, 2025, community members started leaving flowers, candles, photos, notes, and other items at Brown’s Van Wickle Gates and near the Barus and Holley building where the devastating shooting took place.

In the weeks that followed, the memorials expanded, taking root in the snow. And when students resumed classes after winter break in late January, many made a point of adding their own bouquets to the growing memorials in honor of Ella Cook ’28 and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov ’29, whose lives were lost. Nine other students were injured in the shooting.

Flowers are ephemeral by nature, but as part of an ongoing effort to care for the memorials, University leaders collected and saved samples with the goal of preserving some in perpetuity. Many are being stored at the Brown University Herbarium, an on-campus natural history museum for preserved plants. The effort is part of the Brown Ever True healing and recovery initiative, a campus-wide project to bring together resources, programming, and services focused on mental health, psychological wellness, and ensuring a strong sense of community in the aftermath of the mass shooting.

As conversations move forward for engaging the community in planning for permanent memorialization, preserving flowers from the more fleeting memorials is a way to respectfully document a difficult moment in Brown’s history. Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Matthew Guterl, PhD, who is coordinating the Brown Ever True operational team, says they were inspired by an effort at Michigan State University to archive memorial objects following a school shooting there in 2023. Guterl connected with Rebecca Kartzinel, PhD, the director of the Brown University Herbarium, who has deep experience with plant identification, preservation, and archiving.

On the morning of Friday, Dec. 26, a frigid, 16-degree day, the two met on a nearly empty campus. First at the Van Wickle Gates and then on Brook Street near Barus and Holley, they solemnly pried delicate stems from the snow. The act was both deeply emotional and technically challenging, as many of the plants had already frozen solid.

“Rebecca showed a seriousness of intention that I think our community would be glad to learn about,” Guterl says. “It was quite moving. I remember being very quiet, even perfectly still at times, moved as we were by the reverence of that time and place.”

Together, the pair was able to extract around 16 flowers, with several from each memorial location. They looked for flowers that would preserve effectively and represent the aesthetic beauty of the bouquets, says Kartzinel, an assistant teaching professor of biology and of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology.

“I selected flowers that would press well and seemed likely to keep their integrity as they thawed, which included chrysanthemums, peonies, baby’s breath, statice, lavender, and more,” she says. “We took single stems from different bouquets to show the variety of flowers people had left.”

Kartzinel bundled the flowers against the cold and brought them to the herbarium, where she pressed, dried, and safely stored the specimens. For each flower, she recorded which memorial it came from. The next step in the preservation process, Kartzinel says, will be to mount the specimens onto sheets of archival paper.

Guterl says the flowers are being held “in trust” for the Brown community, while decisions are made about whether some may be formally added to the herbarium collection as specimens and which may be preserved elsewhere.

“In addition to flower collection and preservation, this effort is meant to hold space and time as we consider how these memorials have helped us to begin the healing and recovery process, and how best to honor that,” Guterl says.