Specimens: Curators’ Choices

Mrs. Thring’s specimen of Centaurea montana, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

When herbarium curators select specimens to display, either virtually or physically, what kinds of specimens do they choose?  They might pick out “beautiful” specimens.  Clare Drinkell, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew posted one with the comment:   “Sometimes a beautifully pressed specimen just stops me in my tracks.  Mrs Thring’s Centaurea montana collected in Switzerland ‘between the years 1845 and 1855.’”   Jo Wilbraham, curator of algae at the Natural History Museum, London also has a good eye, posting an “elaborately pressed” specimen of the seaweed Mesogloia vermiculata, collected by Edward George in 1895 on the Isle of Man.  When she was asked what was the “most exotic” specimen in the collection of over a million, she “immediately retrieved a folder of Claudea elegans,” including a specimen collected in Australia by the Irish botanist William Henry Harvey. 

Curators also have an eye for the unusual which explains why Wilbraham posted a very long specimen of Alaria that fills seven sheets—and still required folding the specimen.  It was again collected by Edward George, this time while he was on vacation in Whitby in 1866.  She adds: “Probably the largest specimen in Algae @NHM_Botany. . . . Imagining him trying to press this in a local guest house.”  Also displayed by many curators are their collections’ oldest specimens.  The very active herbarium at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville started a flurry of Tweets when it announced:  “What are your oldest #specimens? We used to think ours was a 𝘏𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘴 𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 collected in Ohio in 1836, but yesterday a student found this 𝘛𝘩𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘪 collected in Germany in 1819!”  The herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Madrid countered with a specimen of Buffonia tenuifolia from 1789.  Then the State Herbarium of South Australia presented a fern Leptopteris hymenophylloides collected in 1768 in New Zealand on Captain James Cook’s first around-the-world voyage.  However, all were silenced when the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Tweeted about  a 1697 Stoebe cutting from South Africa.

An announcement from the Marie-Victorin Herbarium at the Montreal Botanical Garden began with the statement:  “Digitization of biological collections has numerous advantages, including making discoveries of remarkable material hidden away within them!”  It went on to describe a find made by a volunteer entering label data:  a specimen of Carex longerostrata collected in 1779 on the Kamchatka Peninsula by David Nelson during Capt. James Cook’s third voyage. Until then, the oldest known specimens in the herbarium were collected by Andrew Holmes in Montreal in the early 1820s.  As the article notes:  “The Marie-Victorin Herbarium just got 40 years older!”  Earlier, the specimen had been in the collection from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.  Digitization also led to the discovery of surprisingly old specimens in the herbarium of Claude Bernard University in Lyon.  It houses the massive collection of Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924), a great-grandnephew of Napoleon I.  All 760,000 of his specimens have recently been digitized, leading to the discovery of plants from 1799, and what the herbarium described as “a real surprise.” 

In all these announcements, there is a sense of  the thrill of finding something new and out of the ordinary.  It is one of the reasons I love herbaria; they are full of such wonders, and digitization is definitely bringing many of them to light, while also making them available for a much broader audience to appreciate.  Of course there are some unpleasant discoveries including what are termed “curation crimes,” with Scotch tape being among the most common.  At RBGE the tip of a very long leaf that wouldn’t fit on the front, was taped to the back.  Laura Jennings at Kew was distressed to find an inflorescence so covered in glue that it couldn’t be identified.  She also retweeted Brittany Sutherland’s crime-watch post on a pine specimen filed in an Illicium folder; her remark:  “This is why people are not allowed to reshelve their own library books.” 

The University of Reading’s complaint was the use of a ballpoint pen and a felt tip marker on a label, but with the comment that the specimen was “well-pressed.”  I was told by a curator of the Sloane collection that even a few of its stately pages were annotated with ballpoint pen.  Other crimes have also been reported by the NHM, including one where the statute of limitations may very well have run out.  At least two sheets from the herbarium of Miss C. M. Cautley have large gaps where specimens have obviously been cut out, paper and all.  These are included in a project called LoveLincsPlants where specimens collected in Lincolnshire were sent to NHM to be digitized and become part of the museum’s collection, but with a website for this collection so that in one way it retains its identity.  In addition, the project involves continued collecting to document the Lincolnshire area as it changes over time.

I’ll end not so much with a crime but a misadventure that the perpetrator readily admitted to.  Yvette Harvey, a skilled botanist and able curator of the Royal Horticulture Society’s herbarium, attempted to press hyacinth specimens.  She reported:  “First attempt at pressing hyacinths into blotting paper…. epic fail no. 1… specimens turned to mush and drying room had a rather exotic fragrance.”  The next day:  “Second attempt… 34 new specimens pressed in parchment and swapped cardboard corrugates for aluminum ones…. epic failure no. 2….. specimens turned to mush, drying room had an intoxicating aroma and I spent a morning removing mould from the corrugate.”  Harvey then decided to admire hyacinths from a distance.

Taxon and the Flora of Madeira

Map of Madeira, 1904, Edward Stanford; David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

This series of posts deals with the articles found in the systematic botany journal Taxon that deal with topics beyond conventional taxonomic treatments.  Among my favorites are those with an historical slant, like a recent one dealing with the plant collections of Richard Thomas Lowe (1802-1874) on the island of Madeira (Mesquita et al., 2022).  To put his work in context Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander visited there and made collections in 1768, early in James Cook’s first voyage around the world.  Francis Masson also did so a decade later.  Lowe was the next botanist to make significant collections on Madeira and the other islands of its archipelago, but his work was not confined to a brief visit.  He lived on Madeira from 1826 until 1852, much of that time as a clergyman.  He spent the rest of his life in England, but returned to Madeira for several months almost yearly.  When he died in a shipwreck in 1874, he was still working on his flora of Madeira that was published in several volumes. 

The Taxon paper covers the authors’ research on 2,280 of Lowe’s specimens that they were able to georeference, most now at the herbaria of the Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  Positional uncertainty was noted.  Lowe’s locale descriptions varied in specificity but more than half rated as very high or high.  During his years of collecting, he had managed to visit most parts of the island, though not surprisingly, areas with steep slopes, of which there are many, were not visited.  His later work often involved returning to areas where he could find plant groups that posed taxonomic problems.  He was someone who came to know his research area well as is revealed in his writings.  His specimens were from 1350 locations and represented about 800 different taxa.  Lowe visited many locations a number of times, including at different times of the year.  He sent duplicates to several other botanists with exchanges of information on many taxa.  His correspondents included William Jackson Hooker, John Henslow, Robert Brown, Augustin de Candolle, and Philip Webb.  The researchers conclude:  “As a result of Lowe’s sustained and systematic approach, he is the single most prolific contributor to the study of Madeira’s endemic flora (p. 876).” 

Lowe’s work is an important contribution to biodiversity research because oceanic islands like Madeira have high proportions of endemic species and provide examples of rapid evolutionary radiations.  Also, because of the island’s size, populations are relatively low for many species, so having a historical record of occurrence in the past is helpful for present-day conservation efforts.  The fact that there were areas that Lowe found too remote or impossible to explore, including the many areas of cliffs, mean that these are good places in which to search for new species.  Equipment for scaling rock faces has improved, and even drones can be employed in survey work.   

There is much more to the article than I can recount in this post.  The number and content of the figures indicate how much analysis went into this paper and thus how much it says about Lowe’s contributions.  Maps are key, including the first figure, a topographic map with place names for Madeira and indicating just how much elevation variability exists there.  Next are more detailed historical maps and then a series of maps showing where Lowe’s georeferenced specimens were collected noting first locations, then precision of locations, followed by vegetation zones, and slope.  For slope, there is also a bar graph showing the relationship between slope and the amount of area at that slope. 

Then comes my two favorite graphics, or at least the ones I found most telling.  Figure 9 shows six maps of the island representing the itineraries for extended trips in six different years ranging from 1827 to 1860, including two Lowe made when he was no longer living there.  These are color-coded to show the months when each location was visited.  This is a good example of a well-designed graphic, as is figure 10, a graph that tracks with a line the number of specimens collected each year.  Then for each year it also gives bars indicating the percent of specimens from the six most common families on the island.  In most years, Lowe collected in all these families, but there are indications that, as mentioned in the text, he was focused on particular groups at certain points.  For example, in 1872, near the end of his collecting, Poaceae and Lamiaceae specimens were particularly well-collected.  Not coincidently they were the two families that had yet to be published in A Manual Flora of Madeira, which was left unfinished at the time of his death in a shipwreck that occurred when he was again bound for Madeira. 

I had never heard of Richard Lowe before I read this article, but it pains me that his flora was left unfinished.  The researchers who produced this work used the extensive data they generated from painstaking georeferencing and analysis to create not only a work of science but of history.  They created a portrait of a botanist and of work that will inform biodiversity research in the future and also support further study of the history of botany in Madeira.  They used specimen data and also delved deeply into Lowe’s correspondence and notes in a beautiful example of bioinformatics meeting the digital humanities.

References

Mesquita, S., Carine, M., Castel-Branco, C., & Menezes de Sequeira, M. (2022). Documenting the flora of a diversity hotspot: Richard Thomas Lowe (1802–1874) and his botanical exploration of Madeira island. TAXON, 71(4), 876–891. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12661

Taxon and Digitization

Madhuca longifolia from Singapore, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

This series of posts is looking at articles that have appeared in Taxon and deal with broader issues than the journal’s main fare of taxonomic treatments.  A timely article appeared a few months ago measuring how effective digital specimen images are in taxonomic research (Phang et al., 2022).  This study grew out of the COVID pandemic when access to collections was almost nonexistent in many parts of the world.  The authors were working on the genus Madhuca (Sapotaceae) for the Flora of Singapore.  Two were based in Scotland and one in Singapore, but all had the same access problem.  In this report they evaluated images of Madhuca collections from both Singapore and the adjacent Malaysian state of Johore.  The images were found in a number of JSTOR Global Plants and herbarium databases.  Another major source was the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Sapotaceae Resource Centre (SRC) database, which also stores specimen and field images taken by researchers, often of material not otherwise available online. 

The overall result of the study was that while specimen images were valuable research tools, they could not provide all the information needed for a thorough taxonomic analysis.  In many cases, micro-morphological characters could not be seen clearly in digital images, even at high resolution, and these are precisely the characters often needed in defining the boundaries among species.  To provide quantitative results, the researchers rated the images as of high, medium, or low utility.  For the high ranking, an image needed to capture at least 5 qualitative and 3 quantitative macro-molecular characters.  Medium needed to meet the first criterion but not the second, and low had to have 4 qualitative characters. 

The report provides in-depth analysis of the results that I’ll just briefly recap here.  Not surprisingly, the specimen images found in herbarium databases ranked more highly than those in the SRC that were taken by researchers.  It wasn’t always a matter of the image quality that was the problem, but the absence of a ruler tool, like the one found in JSTOR Global Plants, or at least a measurement bar as a standard.  The authors also reported:  “Of the 219 specimen images examined, 125 (comprising 103 researcher images and 22 institutional images) had macromorphological characteristics hidden from view due to the low resolution of the image, the way the specimen had been mounted onto the herbarium sheet or had portions placed in an unopened capsule on the sheet” (p. 1068).  Herbarium databases varied in terms of the image resolution available.  Better quality images could probably be obtained by contacting the institution, but this often wasn’t possible during COVID, and in any case, would add steps to the taxonomist’s work. 

Other findings were that fruit and seed measurements were difficult for all images, with very few fruiting specimens available.  This was in part because there were usually only a few specimens for each species under study, a reminder of the crying need for continued collection, particularly in biodiverse areas with many species having either small populations or limited ranges.  Over all, the taxonomists were only able to identify 22% of the Madhuca species from researcher images, that number rose to 34% with institutional ones, and to 94% with physical examination of the specimen when the Singapore herbarium was again accessible.  This last figure resulted not only from microscopic examination of specimens, but from being able to closely examine flowers and fruits and open fragment packets.  The major message of the study is that online resources are very valuable for taxonomic investigations, but don’t come close to replacing specimens themselves.

It’s important to remember that there are many uses for online collections that don’t necessarily require such close study.  Virtual access is sufficient for many uses, especially when the access is through an information-rich database that’s easy to use.  Usability was the focus of a post on the Natural Sciences Collection Association website written by Teagan Reinert and Karen Bacon of the National University of Ireland, Galway.  It is a brief, but valuable recap of what determines a database’s rating anywhere from “very easy” to “usable but frustrating.”  It articulates what many of us experience subliminally as we search for specimens. 

To take the frustrating end of the spectrum first, there are sites that may have long loading time, low-quality images, return many irrelevant results, or “just don’t work.”  Sometimes a keyword search is handy, but the advanced search should be easy to find, and it’s great if searches by date range or cultivated species are easy to do.  Databases like those of New York Botanical Garden or the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh are given high marks because all the basic information on a specimen is shown without having to click further or open several screens.  The latter is particularly cumbersome if many specimens need to be accessed.  As for images, good quality is definitely a plus; also useful is an easy way to tell if there are differently sized images available.  For each image it should be clear what the license status is, such as public domain or creative commons license.  I find this very helpful, as is the last suggestion in the post:  “How the image or specimen data should be cited should be stated very clearly on the website either on its own easily accessed or clear labelled page, or on the specimen’s landing page. . . . But that information can sometimes be hidden in Frequently Asked Questions or on the bottom of a page that isn’t entirely relevant.”  Amen.

Reference

Phang, A., Atkins, H., & Wilkie, P. (2022). The effectiveness and limitations of digital images for taxonomic research. TAXON, 71(5), 1063–1076. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12767

Herbarium Stories: Ukraine

A broken window in the Schmalhausen & Rogowicz Memorial Herbaria Room of the National Herbarium of Ukraine (Mosyakin and Shiyan, 2022)

So far the herbarium stories I’ve told in this series of posts are about discovering hidden collections and bringing more order and attention to them.  The story in this post is about an orderly collection that has been thrown into disorder.  The National Herbarium of Ukraine (KW) at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany in Kyiv was hit by a Russian missile strike on October 10, 2022.  The specimens themselves were spared damage as were the staff members, but windows were broken, debris strewn around, walls and ceilings crumbled.  The staff worked to return things as close to normal as they could:  boarding up windows, cleaning up fallen plaster, getting things back into some semblance of order.  In fact, there were even plans to begin some restoration work in November, but by that time it was clear that materials and tools wouldn’t be available for the foreseeable future. 

As with so much of the devastation in Ukraine, this was an obvious attack on a civilian target.  You can’t get much more nonmilitant than an herbarium.  The same was true for the entire area surround the Kholdny Institute:  university buildings, museums, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and other facilities.  All this is outlined in an article by Sergei Mosyakin of the Institute of Botany and Natalia Shiyan of the National Herbarium.  They include photographs of the interior and exterior damage.  The trauma of the attack is palpable in their descriptions.  As with any such destruction, they kept discovering new problems, such as a leaky roof with the first rain after the bombing. 

It is apparent from the herbarium’s website, and from the information on Index Herbariorum as of this post, Ukraine has a sizable botanical infrastructure, with 26 active herbaria, though the activity has slowed to a trickle since the war began.  There are no loans being exchanged, though if possible curators will send digital images.  The herbarium at Karazin University in Kharkiv had been hit on March 3, 2022 also with infrastructure damage, but no harm to personnel.  Across Ukraine, scientific endeavors of all kinds have been seriously impacted by the war, mirroring what has happened to all aspects of Ukrainian life.  Yet botanists are still attempting to protect their collections, so this is a story of hope as well as devastation.

The National Herbarium, which celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 2021, holds over two and a quarter million specimens, the largest collection in Eastern Europe.  Some specimens date to the 18^th century.  Obviously, there is an impressive collection of Ukrainian plants, with others from around the world, particularly from countries in the former Soviet Union.  It was an active collection too.  In the ten years before the war, there were a hundred thousand accessions.  One of the great things about investigating the herbarium world, is that, as I’ve mentioned in the earlier posts in this series, it increases geographical awareness.  Unfortunately, war has a similar effect.  I am now much more aware of the countries surrounding Ukraine, because of the large-scale movement of refugees across its borders, and the areas of support and threat that lie there.  The present situation in Ukraine is a reminder that herbaria in many parts of the world have precarious existences.  This is also true of collections in Europe and North America, where a few herbaria continue to be threatened with extinction, but in some parts of the world, the threatened collections can make up the majority.

There was a recent article in Plant Systematics and Evolution about a survey of Balkan Peninsula herbaria (Jogan & Bacic, 2020).  The authors sent out a survey to each of the area’s 57 herbaria listed in Index Herbariorum to assess their activity and resources.  Over 50% responded and the results were quite discouraging.  Now almost every herbarium administrator feels overworked and coping with insufficient resources, but the circumstances seem particularly severe in the Balkans.  Even something as basic as pest control doesn’t meet minimal standards in many cases, and two thirds of facilities have no air conditioning.  There are very low rates of specimen exchanges and loans.  Databases are often not accessible to the public, and many collections are largely undigitized.  This speaks to a weakened botanical community that includes notable institutions such as the Budapest Herbarium with a significant historical collection among its over 2 million specimens.  Geographically, these areas have long fascinated botanists like John Sibthorp who traveled there twice at the end of the 18^th century (Harris, . 

It is easy to find stories on the web about what is going on at the Kew or Missouri Botanical Garden herbaria, but it’s important to remember that there are about 3,250 active herbaria according to Index Herbariorum.  Each one is a jewel, each one containing a history of plant life at particular places and times.  No specimens are really replaceable.  Yes, an herbarium that has been damaged such as the one at Berlin-Dahlem in World War II can be partially restored by the gifting of duplicates that had been sent to other institutions, but then these institutions are less rich (Hiepko, 1987).  Those in the herbarium world are making their institutions more public-facing so people outside the botanical world become aware of the scientific and cultural importance of their collections.  However, I think they also have an obligation to communicate with and about institutions that have too long been undervalued, no matter where in the world they may be.

References

Harris, S. (2007). The Magnificent Flora Graeca: How the Mediterranean Came to the English Garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hiepko, P. (1987). The collections of the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem and their history. Englera, 7, 219–252.

Jogan, N., & Bačič, M. (2020). Balkan herbaria: Do we have to worry about them? Plant Systematics and Evolution, 306(2), 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-020-01651-1

Mosyakin, S. L., & Shiyan, N. M. (2022). The M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany and the National Herbarium of Ukraine (KW), Kyiv: Damage due to the missile strikes on 10 October 2022. Ukrainian Botanical Journal, 79(5), 339–342.

At A.C. Moore Herbarium: Materiality of Specimens

Celtis laevigata var. laevigata collected by Henry Ravenel along the Santee Canal in April. Henry William Ravenel Collection at A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia

During the pandemic, I became interested in digital medieval manuscripts after reading a blog post by a researcher studying the digitization of manuscripts at Cambridge University and being unable to access the manuscripts themselves (Haaren, 2020).  I began comparing this digitization process to that of herbarium specimens.  “Materiality” is a term much used in the manuscript world for the look and feel of parchment or paper and the way documents are damaged, annotated, amended over time.  It struck me that such issues also pertain to herbarium specimens, but it’s not something that’s often a matter of focus.  Botanists are interested in the information on sheets:  what the plant itself can tell them and what else they can learn from the label, determination slips, and other notations. 

What I want to argue here is that materiality can have at least a subliminal effect on how specimens are viewed and handled.  I want to use as a study case a number of specimens from the herbarium I’ve been highlighting in this series of posts (1,2,3), that of the A.C. Moore Herbarium (USCH) at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.  As I mentioned earlier, it holds the collection of the 19^th-century botanist and planter Henry William Ravenel (1817-1887).  Ravenel was born into a family of planters in South Carolina’s low country relatively near the coast.  In the 1840s, he moved to the southwest part of the state, to the town of Aiken, and bought a plantation there.  Of course, the American Civil War is the elephant in this room.  Before then, he was successful in large part because he owned 80 slaves who worked his land, giving him time to devote to plants and fungi.  By 1860, he had published five volumes of fungal exsiccati and had a wide correspondence with the likes of Asa Gray, George Engelmann, and Edward Tuckerman.

Convinced of the confederate cause, Ravenel sunk all his money into war bonds and was thus left in dire financial straits after the war, with no slaves to farm his land and no one willing to buy it at anywhere near its previous value.  He turned to botany, no longer as just a beloved avocation but as a source of income.  His journals and letters, which have all been transcribed and are available online and cross-referenced with his specimens, record his efforts.  After the war, he was able to resume correspondence with his former botanical colleagues.  He wrote to them asking for advice:  would there be an interest in southern specimens (not really in the post-war era), was there a market for the volumes of his exsiccati (Tuckerman was able to sell some of them and also bought some of his books), what about starting a nursery (nurseryman Thomas Meehan in Philadelphia sent him stock and gave him $50 in start-up money that didn’t need to be repaid). 

Ravenel did cobble together a livelihood and a botanical support group.  He was sent by the federal government to collect plants in Texas in 1869, prepared large cuttings of southern trees for Charles Sprague Sargent in Massachusetts, and traded specimens with the likes of Alvan Chapman in Florida, Stephen Olney in Rhode Island Delaware, and Moses Curtis in the Appalachian regions of the Carolinas (Haygood, 1987).  I can’t go into any more of his background, but you can learn about him on the Plants and Planter website.  Now I want to get to the materiality of Ravenel’s specimens by looking at a couple of them.  As was common in the 19^th century, most were mounted on thin paper, now discolored.  After Ravenel’s death, a cousin bought the flowering plant collection from his widow and contributed it to Converse College, in Spartanburg, SC (now Converse University).  The college transferred the collection to USCH in 2004, when its conservation was begun.

There are a variety of sheets in any one folder.  In some cases, the original sheets are themselves mounted on heavier sheets (see image in earlier post); in many cases the original paper is cut around the plant, creating a collage that includes the original label and later determinations, some made in the 1930s when the collection was obviously given attention.  The grasses, for example, were sent for annotation to Mary Agnes Chase at the US Department of Agriculture.  There are also specimens that were apparently easier to remove from damaged mounts and pasted to new sheets.  The original labels are also included, and their darkened paper stands out against the white background (see above).

These remounted specimens, which make up most of the Ravenel collection, are what got me thinking about the materiality of the Ravenel collection.  They look so different from the few older sheets that are extant.  All the plants are from the same period, yet the ones on new sheets look so much fresher.  I think there is also a tendency to handle them with less reverence because the paper is not fragile, there is little reminder of their age.  This got me thinking about the folders in the main collections.  Most of the specimens are from the 20^th century, with a good number from the 21^st.  However, the specimens from the 1930s and 1940s are often on thin and yellowed paper.  Going through a folder, I think there is a subconscious assessment made in handling each sheet:  delicate, old and fragile; recent, tough and vibrant; or somewhere in between.  These are obviously aesthetic assessments, but they are also practical ones in terms of how the sheets are handled.  They may not require the care in handling a medieval manuscript does—or maybe they do.  Plant material is more fragile than the paper on which it is mounted and paper is more fragile than parchment.  Materiality does matter.

Note: I am very grateful to John Nelson and Herrick Brown for their very helpful commentaries and corrections on this series of posts.

References

Haaren, S. van. (2020, May 25). Physical distancing from manuscripts and the presence of the digital facsimile. Cambridge Medieval Graduate Students. https://camedievalists.wordpress.com/2020/05/25/physical-distancing-from-manuscripts-and-the-presence-of-the-digital-facsimile/

Haygood, T. M. (1987). Henry William Ravenel, 1814-1887: South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

At A.C. Moore Herbarium: Ecology

Diphasiastrum digitatum collected by Ronald Chicone, Jr. at Saluda Shoals Park, SC on Novemeber 5, 2000. A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia

The human brain has a problem with complexity; it can easily be overloaded, which is why simplification and classification are so important in human learning.  This helps to explain why a herbarium sheet usually displays a specimen, or maybe specimens, of a single species.  The plant is spread out so as many observable characteristics as possible are clearly displayed, and since only one species is involved, it makes the sheet easy to put into a single category, a particular species folder.  The same convention of solitude is found in botanical illustration even from the few early illustrations extant on papyrus (Griebeler, 2022).  However, to state the obvious, plants don’t grow this way.  A reminder of this is apparent on an unusual specimen from the A.C. Moore Herbarium (USCH) at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, the institution that is the subject of this series of posts.

The sheet in question is labeled and filed as Diphasiastrum digitatum (USCH0073424) formerly Lycopodium digitatum, a fern ally (see above).  What makes it so eye-catching is that distributed over the sheet are several leaves: one each of maple, oak, and elm.  These are listed on the label as among the species present in this hardwood forest habitat.  Such references are common on labels, but including specimens of the associated species is not.  The leaves are unlabeled, nor are leaves of all the trees mentioned on the label included.  Still, it’s a sheet that catches the eye, and also serves as a reminder that no plant is ever really alone on a sheet.

This Diphasiastrum was collected in 2000 by Ron Chicone, Jr.  A search of the USCH database turned many other specimens collected by him, though none as species-diverse as the Diphasiatrum.  A search of SERNEC, the database for the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, revealed many more of his specimens.  LinkedIn provided the information that Ronald Chicone, Jr. graduated from Coastal Carolina University and since then has held several positions, including one as herbarium staff at the University of South Florida.  He is now a land management specialist for the Brevard County Environmentally Endangered Lands Program in Florida.  So Chicone has spent his career looking at plants in ecological contexts, just as this specimen suggests. 

This fits well into Mason Heberling’s (2022) argument that plant collections have been underused by ecologists for many kinds of studies, including of seasonal and geographical variations in plant traits.  Now botanists are also looking at the roots of herbarium specimens to identify a species’ fungal partners and have successfully extracted DNA from many of them (Heberling & Burke, 2019).  Also, the soil on roots can harbor algae, yet another organism in a vascular plant’s ecosystem—and a reason to leave a little soil on a specimen’s roots (Parker, Schanen & Renner, 1976), though this is considered by some to be haphazard specimen preparation.

Also being investigated is insect damage to specimens’ leaves using a grid system to calculate the extent of eaten areas (Meineke et al., 2019), and it’s not uncommon to find dead insects on a specimen.  Years ago, D.R. Whitehead (1976) wrote an article entitled, “Collecting Beetles in Exotic Places: The Herbarium,” in which he argued that a plant collection was a good place to look for new beetle species.  There is also research on new species of tiny snails first found on plant specimens (Miquel & Bungartz, 2017).  At USCH, researchers have recently begun microscopic examination of invertebrates lurking on algae specimens.  So herbaria can be sources of many kinds of biodiversity beyond the plant world and can contribute to ecological studies on multispecies interactions, including those involving plant pathogens.  

Despite this, I don’t see Chicone’s approach as becoming common, though it does suggest the surprises that can be found in any herbarium.  He was just out of college when he made this collection, so he was relatively new to the world of botany and perhaps therefore less concerned with its traditions and constraints.  Yet, he was hardly a neophyte because the collection number for this specimen is 236.  He probably didn’t mount it, but he must have tucked those leaves into the newspaper in which he pressed the plant.  This means that someone at USCH thought enough of the inclusion to mount the leaves, rather than tossing them out as irrelevant.  So the mounter was also party to this innovation/anomaly.

I am hardly recommending that adding in associated species become standard herbarium practice, though it might be nice if specimens were crossed-reference with those collected at the same time and place.  What I do think is important about this sheet is its role as a reminder that there are many unspoken do’s and don’ts that botanists absorb while working in an herbarium, and it is good to be aware of these.  They are constraints that make botany more organized, and also perhaps more canalized. 

Note: I am very grateful to John Nelson and Herrick Brown for their very helpful commentaries and corrections on this series of posts.

References

Griebeler, A. (2022). Production and design of early illustrated herbals. Word & Image, 38(2), 104–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1951518

Heberling, J. M. (2022). Herbaria as big data sources of plant traits. International Journal of Plant Sciences, 183(2), 87–118. https://doi.org/10.1086/717623

Heberling, J. M., & Burke, D. J. (2019). Utilizing herbarium specimens to quantify historical mycorrhizal communities. Applications in Plant Sciences, 7(4), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.1223

Meineke, E. K., Classen, A. T., Sanders, N. J., & Davies, T. J. (2019). Herbarium specimens reveal increasing herbivory over the past century. Journal of Ecology, 107(1), 105–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13057

Miquel, S. E., & Bungartz, F. (2017). Snails found among herbarium specimens of Galapagos lichens and bryophytes, with the description of Scolodonta rinae (Gastropoda: Scolodontidae), a new species of carnivorous micro-mollusk. International Journal of Malacology, 173–186. https://doi.org/10.1127/arch.moll/146/173-186

Whitehead, D. R. (1976). Collecting beetles in exotic places: The herbarium. The Coleopterists Bulletin, 30(3), 249–250.

At A.C. Moore Herbarium: Aesthetics

Limnobium spongia collected by Alvan Chapman in Apalachicola, FL. Henry William Ravenel Collection at A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia

In this series of posts, I’m focusing on the holdings of the A.C. Moore Herbarium (USCH) at the University of South Carolina.  Here I want to discuss the beauty I come upon among the specimens.  Aesthetically pleasing plants are replete in any herbarium, but since almost all are hidden away most of the time, this beauty goes unappreciated, as does art in the vast warehouses of museums like the Met and the Louvre.  The great thing about volunteering in an herbarium is that I get an opportunity to come upon gorgeous specimens on a regular basis.  Recently, I was hunting for something in the mounting room and saw a Passiflora sheet collected by John Nelson, curator emeritus.  Now Nelson did get help from the plant here; the delicacy of its flower is hard to beat.  Carl Linnaeus also had a lovely example that is now the lectotype for the species Passiflora caerulea. 

The herbarium holds the specimens of Henry William Ravenel (1814-1887) a nineteenth-century South Carolina botanist.  This collection of slightly more than 6000 specimens was entrusted to the care of the herbarium by Converse College (now University) in Spartanburg, SC.   The college had received the plants from Ravenel’s cousin who had bought them from his widow (Haygood, 1987).  Most of the specimens have been remounted, but in some cases the plants couldn’t be easily removed from the original mount, so the specimen and its paper were attached to a new sheet.  In every case, all labels, notes, and determinations were also remounted.  A specimen I find particularly attractive is a American frogbit Limnobium spongia (HWR-00048010) collected by Alvan Wentworth Chapman in Apalachicola, Florida (see above).  The combination of the form of the leaves and bending of the stems with the texture of the paper makes is so appealing.  The subtlety of the colors of the plant and that of the paper is also attractive. 

In general, the Ravenel specimens are treasures because they not only give evidence of what was growing in the 19^th century in South Carolina and other parts of the South, as well as more broadly, since Ravenel exchanged specimens with many botanists.  There are also some notes with interesting information on locale or habitat.  Ravenel’s journals and correspondence have been digitized and transcribed.  They are available on the Plants and Planter website along with all his specimens and even maps, so it is easy to search for information on particular collectors or collection events.  Obviously the University of South Carolina appreciates the collection and has worked with other institutions to maximize its availability to both botanists and historians.

But even for recent collections of species that aren’t that photogenic, an expert mounter can make something wonderful from it.  Take another Nelson specimen, this one of southern bog clubmoss Lycopodiella appressum (USCH0073992, see below).  There are any number of aesthetic theories and definitions of what makes something beautiful.  Among the qualities often mentioned elegance as one, and the Passiflora fits the bill there.  Another is symmetry, and with Lycopodiella the mounter has taken this aesthetic quality and created something eye-catching from rather mundane material.  But there’s more than aesthetics involved in this sheet, there is also a good use of space, to make sure all parts of both plants are displayed.  Some students of beauty think that too much symmetry can be boring, and that an interplay of symmetry and asymmetry is more pleasing as is apparent here.  For this specimen the obvious symmetry is enlivened by the asymmetry of the crossed branches. 

Lycopodiella appressum collected by John Nelson at the headwaters of Sandy Run, SC on June 23, 1989. A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia

As with any artwork, it takes time to appreciate all this sheet has to offer, and usually botanists tend to push aesthetics aside and focus on the information in a beautifully mounted plant.  This makes perfect sense, specimens are first and foremost scientific objects stored for research and educational purposes.  However, it doesn’t hurt to spend a moment from time to time just to soak in the beauty, because, as I have argued before (see earlier post), aesthetics is an intrinsic part of botanical inquiry.  In the last post, I discussed the difficulties of collecting, but put less emphasis on the thrills, which is rarely mentioned on labels.  John Nelson has described to me the moment when he discovered a new species of hedge-nettle Stachys caroliniana:  it was a holiday weekend, he was at the beach with his family, and he decided to do a little botanizing.  And there it was.  Needless to say none of this made it into the article he wrote with Douglas Rayner (2014) describing the species.  Elation simply is not part of scientific prose, explaining why scientists are considered a rather stuffy lot.  John Nelson would not be described as stuffy.  It is alleged that for many years he dressed as the masked botanical superhero Plantman for various occasions, but he denies any such involvement, adding that since Plantman is real, no one needs dress up like him. 

Nelson will admit to bringing a “Vivat Linnaeus” banner with him when he leads field trips, either for his students or other groups.  He also began the tradition which continues under the present curator, Herrick Brown (also a banner wielder), of saying “Vivat” whenever entering one of the rabbit warren of rooms that make up the herbarium.  Anyone in the room knows to answer “Linnaeus.”  This is more than just a quaint tribute to the father of modern botany, it also has a practical purpose.  The rooms are filled with cabinets, that it’s good to know where a fellow human may be lurking and not come upon them unannounced and scaring both parties.  Such customs makes the A.C. Moore Herbarium a happy, if crowded, space for doing and enjoying botany, as is testified to by the number of volunteers and students who work there, and often return for a visit long after they’ve moved on. 

Note: I am very grateful to John Nelson and Herrick Brown for their very helpful commentaries and corrections on this series of posts.

References

Haygood, T. M. (1987). Henry William Ravenel, 1814-1887: South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press.

Nelson, J. B., & Rayner, D. A. (2014). A new hedge-nettle (Stachys: Lamiaceae) from South Carolina, USA. Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, 8(2), 431–440.

At A.C. Moore Herbarium: Collecting

Botrychium virginianum collected by Ann Darr and Albert Pittman on August 13, 2003. A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I volunteer at the A.C. Moore Herbarium (USCH) at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.  I am writing this series of posts during Thanksgiving week in part to let the people at the herbarium know how grateful I am for all I learn from them.  From my years of volunteering here and in New York, I know that developing good volunteer requires a lot of work.  They need training, retraining, reminding, herding, and positive reinforcement by the professionals who have many other things to do.  The herbarium’s curator is Herrick Brown who has years of experience managing and digitizing this collection, and has also worked for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) and the Smithsonian.  He took over three years ago when John B. Nelson became curator emeritus.  Like many retired botanists, Nelson continues to work in the herbarium and collect specimens (over 44,000).  Both men are patient and generous in sharing their knowledge, especially about Southern species, and have taught me a great deal about the history of botany.  Plus they make the herbarium a joyous place, along with Amanda Harmon the herbarium manager, Csilla Czako, the data manager, and a band of volunteers both students and master gardeners. 

Nelson was the one who suggested I write a blog post about what doesn’t get recorded on specimen labels to remind people of the amount of work involved in wrangling plants and the difficulties encountered in the field.  This is a very good point.  Rarely are specimen sheets sweat-stained.  It’s easy to forget that a plant collected in a South Carolina swamp in July was harvested by a botanist who was perspiring profusely, persecuted by mosquitos, and in danger of encountering a venomous snake.  There is a plant called coastal doghobble Leucothoe axillaris that Mark Catesby dealt with over 300 years ago in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.  It can still grow in thick stands that are difficult to get through, even for a hunting dog.  Added to that is the South Carolina summer heat and humidity; hydration is essential, and water is heavy to carry. 

Botanists’ logs or journals may make note of some problems, but environmental conditions are so much a part of the job that they are often ignored.  Even if the temperature is moderate and the insects in abeyance, collecting is still work:  taking notes including geographic coordinates, making sure the specimens are labeled, hauling them around.  There is also the disappointment if the particular object of a foray doesn’t appear or is past its prime.  I could go on, but this might get depressing.  So I’ll also mention the thrill of finding something unexpected and in full bloom, or sitting under a tree with a cool breeze providing the perfect respite. 

I want to mention a case where the difficulties slipped onto a specimen label for the fern Botrychium virginianum (USCH0075490, see above).   I found the sheet pictured above on the same day that Nelson gave me the idea for this post.  The label is enlarged so you can see clearly the cross-out on the first line:  “The day started in the wrong direction.”  Ann Darr and Albert Pittman both worked for the SCDNR and were conducting a survey of mafic areas, those with igneous rock, in Pickens County in the northwest part of the state where the Piedmont meets the Blue Ridge Escarpment.  I would assume Darr wrote the label since her collection number is recorded, and Brown has pointed out to me another one of her witty labels.¹  However, I don’t know if she later regretted being so blunt, or if Pittman or someone else crossed it out.  However, I’m glad it is still legible.  After all, the precise details about the mistake are given in the next line, and it is easy to see how a mistake was made:  mistaking Little Caesar for Caesar.²

No one is perfect, and it is nice to see such candor, tinged with humor, on a label.  It would have seemed a shame not to note an error that made the day a little (or a lot?) more difficult.  It would have been especially annoying at the start:  all fired up for collecting and then having to go back to square one.  Keep in mind, this was not flat land.  As the labels notes, their access to the collection site was “by way of the Foothills Trail: Sassafras Mountain to Chimneytop Gap.”  This fern was collected in August so a trip to the mountains might have been a nice respite from the heat of Columbia where DNR is headquartered.  Still, no one wants to make a mistake, especially when they are not alone.  Yet having collecting partners is a good idea because of some of the challenges I’ve already mentioned.

John Nelson can also write labels that tell more than need be to set the stage.  When he was collecting out West, he mentioned the presence of a  “Gentleman’s Club” near the collecting site.  On another label for a plant found closer to home, a narrowleaf silkgrass plant (Pityopsis graminifolia USCH0051476), he wrote:  “Corollas bright yellow, plants silvery, offering a vaguely cheerful aspect to an otherwise sad landscape, weedy and pathetic . . . “   There is poetry here and a reminder of the aesthetic aspects of collecting, something that will come up in the next post.  It’s also a reminder that there is a lot to learn about people as well as plants while sifting through specimens and reading labels. 

Notes:

1. USCH0017120: “We parked our vehicle on private land to get to Peach Orchard Mountain.  Believe it or not the gentleman’s name is “Tony Orlando.”  Bert was already asking Tony if he knew “Dawn.”  I wanted to tie a yellow ribbon around Bert’s head.”  Brown told me that he had to look up “Tony Orlando” on the web to figure out what was going on here. 

2. Comment from Brown: “One is pizza, the other an Emperor.”

Acknowledgement: I want to thank Herrick Brown and John Nelson for their careful reading of this series of posts and their thoughtful, if sometimes irrelevant, comments.

Discussing the Plant Humanities: Botany

Pentsemon haydenii

I want to end this series of posts (1,2,3) on the Plant Humanities Conference at Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Library by discussing the plants.  Ned Friedman, a Harvard University biology professor and director of the Arnold Arboretum saw one of the conferences goals as decentering the human in the plant humanities.  He did this with four plant vignettes at time scales that moved further and further from the human.  First, he introduced a single tree at the arboretum, a sand pear, Pyrus pryrifolia, native to East Asia.  The life history of this tree is recorded at the arboretum, and its life expectancy while greater than that of humans, means that visitors 30 years ago saw a much less mature tree.

Then Friedman jumped to discussing the American beech Fagus grandifolia and how pollen cores from thousands of years ago show no evidence of the beech in New England, while cores from more southern regions do.  This record of northern movement of the species is evidence of the warming that occurred after the last ice age, something well beyond human memory.  Stretching the time scale still further, he described two species of tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera from North America and the Asian species Liriodendron chinense.  They are closely related genetically and will form hybrids if grown near each other even though their ranges have been separated geographically for 14 million years.  Finally, Friedman moved on to the hundreds of millions of years involved in the evolution of plant stem and branch structures, leaving his audience breathless from the journey in time and what it means for the presence of plants in our world.

Toward the conference’s end, Rosetta Elkin, a landscape architect at Pratt Institute in New York, discussed the difficulties involved in conservation management through a case study of blowout beardtongue, Pentsemon haydenii, an endemic of blowouts, windswept hollows, of the Nebraska sandhills.  It is an endangered species that has received quite a bit of attention from conservation ecologists.  However, none of their interventions have worked, though they have discovered much about the plant’s life cycle.  This species is a lesson in botanical humility, reminding us of how little we know about plants and of how much there is to learn about a single species.

Elkin is also the author of Tiny Taxonomies (2017), a book with the same title as several of her landscape exhibitions that feature waist-high chrome tubes standing on end.  Each is about a foot in diameter and displays tiny plants.  I was drawn by the book’s title and loved it with its great closeups of many species she used.  But even more, I liked Elkin’s ideas including that she considers smallness a design opportunity and has set up the displays so the clumps of tiny plants are easy to observe closely.  She also noted that when plants are this small, they don’t survive as individuals, but in clusters to trap warm air and moisture.  She sees first-hand experience with plants as a form of research, which I think explains why some people have green thumbs.  They observe and record at least mentally what the plants feel like as they are transplanted, and the minute changes that occur from day to day. 

Some of Elkins ideas I find less positive, including her assertion that the herbarium specimen “has gradually expired as a useful tool for expressing the behavioral and mutable characteristics of plants” (p. 54).  Like a gardener with a green thumb, a sharp eyed and minded botanist can learn a lot from observing a specimen, especially as more focus is being put on using specimens for trait measurements (Heberling, 2022).  I agree more with her view that  “When faced with an herbarium specimen, it is impossible not to feel a sense of loss, as plant life is seemingly obliterated on the sheet.” (p. 54)  However, I do think obliterated is too strong a word.  Despite this, Tiny Taxonomies is a small treasure.

The ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan (1993, 2009) of the University of Arizona used a phrase I loved:  botany needs to dance with the humanities.  I haven’t yet investigated the depths of this metaphor but I see it as involving slow dancing where the couple get to know each other gradually, intimately, and memorably.  It is full of aesthetic nuances directed toward the idea that academic and indigenous botanists need to be in dialogue toward a contemplative ecology of caring for creation.  This is definitely an aspirational goal, but we have too long discounted the aspirational as a driver of change in favor of economic and pragmatic goals that often fall short. 

John McNeill, a Georgetown University historian, again brought up the issue of timescale toward the end of the conference as Ned Friedman had at the beginning.  McNeill thinks that historians and scientists have different timescales, that historians deal in particular moments while scientists look for regularities that persist over time.  He also touched on a topic that pervaded the conference:  the ownership of plants, and what precisely does that mean, or does it really have any meaning across the species divide?  Like the dancing metaphor, this term definitely requires more consideration, as does so much discussed at the conference. 

Note: In describing as much as I have, I still didn’t tell of the beautiful gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, the great meals we had, and the fascinating conversations.  I am grateful to have been part of it all.  I am particularly grateful to Yota Batsaki and Anatole Tchikine for inviting me to attend this event. 

References

Elkin, R. S. (2017). Tiny Taxonomy. New York: Actar.

Heberling, J. M. (2022). Herbaria as Big Data Sources of Plant Traits. International Journal of Plant Sciences, 183(2), 87–118. https://doi.org/10.1086/717623

Nabhan, G. (1993). Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy. Pantheon.

Nabhan, G. (2009). Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine. Island Press.

Discussing the Plant Humanities: Collections

Specimens of Argyroxiphium caliginis with Otto Degener collection number 2557, the same as the one Shih displayed with Wiebke’s name crossed out. In the specimen on the left from KHD, only Degener’s name appears; on the right from US, both names appear.

Felix Driver of Royal Holloway University of London was the first speaker at the Plant Humanities Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, which is the focus of this series of posts.  He was one of the authors of a recent report mapping out future plans for the plant humanities in Britain, making him a good choice for the leadoff role.  He was also the principle investigator for a study called the Mobile Museum on how the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew distributed items from its Economic Botany Collection to schools and museums throughout the country, while still maintaining the core collection at Kew (Driver, Nesbitt & Cornish, 2021).  The height of the distribution was in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  It was a way to provide hands-on exhibit and spread the word not only about the usefulness of a large variety of plants, but also the ability of the British Empire to develop and utilize plant products.

The economic botany collection still exists at Kew under the care of Mark Nesbitt, another contributor to the Mobile Museum project.  With over 100,000 items, the collection is growing, though most items are no longer exhibited as they were when Kew had four buildings with economic botany exhibits in the early 20^th century (Nesbitt & Cornish, 2016).  Now the collection is used for research that often involves what Driver terms “co-producing knowledge with nonacademic partners.”  This includes collaborations with Pacific barkcloth makers and North Brazilian Amazonia indigenous peoples.  Driver ended his presentation with a photo of one item in the collection, a glass lime juice bottle.  He chose this because his grandfather had been born on a lime plantation in Monserrat, with lime juice shipped in barrels from there to bottling plants in England.  The bottle is a small symbol of the British colonial apparatus.

The next day Ashanti Shih, who teaches history at Vassar College, presented on her research in the collections of Hawaii’s Bishop Museum.  She was studying the career of the German botanist Otto Degener who worked in Hawaii for thirty years.  She focused on his interactions with Asian and indigenous people whom he employed.  One of the latter was Henry Wiebke, a native Hawaiian of the Kanaka Maoli people.  Wiebke was studying medicine, and Degener hired him because he had knowledge of native plants, their indigenous names, habitats, and uses.   The pair planned to write two books, one a popular guide to the flora of the Hawaiian National Park, the second a comprehensive flora of the Hawaiian Islands.  After working together as colleagues and friends for six years, their relationship frayed, at least in part over Wiebke’s decision to defer his medical training in order to work to support his family.  He did collaborate for some time with Degener after this, but eventually they parted ways.

When Degener did publish the books, they were without mention of Wiebke (Degener, 1945; 1932-1969), but the erasure of his contribution went beyond that.  Shih showed a specimen of the iconic silver sword, Argyroxiphium caliginis, collected by both men.  Degener’s name is printed on the label with the typed addition of “and Henry Wiebke.”  But Degener later crossed out the latter, as he did on a number of sheets.  This was a small record of petulance preserved in a herbarium where few would see it, until the age of digitization when the principles were long gone.  Shih related the story with more nuance, but the message was clear that here was one of many untold cases of appropriation of indigenous knowledge without proper, or any, attribution.

The next day the conference provided a very different aspect of indigenous knowledge and in this case, its relationship to art.  The presentation was by the artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi, a Jamaican-American from New York who has lived in Lagos, Nigeria since 2011.  She is interested in the culture of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and found a 1995 book by Pierre Verger, The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society, with Latin and vernacular plant names.  It also has poetry that Ogunbiyi uses for inspiration for her art which often includes plant forms.  Several years ago, Ogunbiyi was an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian, and as she delved into collections she became fascinated by the herbarium.  There she asked a very basic question:  why are herbarium sheets always 11.5 by 16.5 inches?  She couldn’t get a good answer, and that just added to her interest in the sheets.  She now does her drawings on herbarium paper, which she sees as “pivotal to my practice.”  She showed several of her works from a recent exhibit in the Berlin Biennale.  They often combine plant forms with African hairstyles in intriguing ways.  She noted that in southwest Nigeria, hairstyles have meaning, and that the head is the foundation of the Yoruba religious practice Ifá.

It’s this thoughtful interweaving of indigenous practice, plants, and art that makes Ogunbiyi’s art so fascinating to me.  She has journeyed back to the continent from which her ancestors were transported centuries ago, and she uses that cultural heritage along with what amounts to a colonial artifact, the herbarium sheet, as a vehicle for exploring it.  She sees her drawings as a form of plant portraiture and the presence of human forms reveals the connections between the two worlds present in Yoruba traditions.  To me, her work and her presentation suggest the power of the plant humanities to open up new worlds for all of us.

References

Degener, O. (1932). Flora Hawaiiensis: The New Illustrated Flora of the Hawaiian Islands (Vol. 1–7). Honolulu.

Degener, O. (1945). Ferns and Flowering Plants of Hawaii National Park. Ann Arbor, MI: Edward Brothers.

Driver, F., Nesbitt, M., & Cornish, C. (Eds.). (2021). Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation. London: UCL Press.

Nesbitt, M., & Cornish, C. (2016). Seeds of industry and empire: Economic botany collections between nature and culture. Journal of Museum Ethnography, 29, 53–70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43915938

Verger, P. (1995). Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society. São Paolo: Odebrecht.