We’re two Northwest-born pals, Sara and James, and Falling Tide Press began as a hobby of ours! A photographer/beach naturalist (Sara) and writer/artist (James), we often join gatherings at another friend’s family property in the San Juan Islands, which includes a stretch of private beach where all kinds of interesting things wash up—including many different kinds of seaweed native to the Salish Sea.

On one of those trips a few years ago, we made a simple press to try our hand at collecting and pressing some of these beautiful algae. (Seaweed pressing is a preservative art practice, similar to flower pressing, that was very popular in Victorian England; many great examples of the craft, dating back over 150 years, are still around today.) We loved the results, our friends did too, and so we kept at it!

All of our collected seaweed is native to the Northwest and hand-gathered by us from the ocean wrack line (the line of washed-up debris left behind by a receding, or falling, tide) on private property. To keep our practice sustainable and environmentally friendly:

· We leave living algae alone. We don’t collect any seaweed that’s still attached by a holdfast (root like structure) to rocks or plants, or damage living seaweed during collection.

· We don’t gather algae that show signs of other life. Even dead seaweed is often home to other living things—including marine eggs or animals like bryozoan—so we inspect our seaweed for life, and if we find it, we let it be.

· We watch out for hitchhikers. We carefully rinse all gathered seaweed free of any tiny critters before taking it away from the beach.