On Garima's first day at the Harvard Herbaria, Anthony had laid out a few specimens for her to look at. Among them was Rheum australe. She remembers being struck by the extraordinary detail of each part—the flowers dried into tiny black specks, the large leaves with their veins standing sharply against the paper. She didn’t quite know what to make of it, so she drew it in her small green notebook.

That drawing became the first note of Home-sick. And quite unwittingly, this artwork became the first in the Home-sick series.

Known colloquially as Padamchal, Rheum australe is a powerful medicinal plant, widely used across the Himalayan belt for a range of ailments. As Garima began travelling through the region, she kept returning to that specimen. The stratified matter of the higher altitudes—the layers of rock, soil, fossils, and plants—began to resemble it: meandering, rising and falling, dense in some places and almost skeletal in others. At times, the landscape itself seemed like a specimen: an accumulation of what the Himalayas have been, and a record of oceanic matter from the ancient Tethys Ocean.