An Herbarium’s Value Stretches Well Beyond Botany

Cotton specimen Gossypium hirsutum collected by Henry W. Ravenel in Aiken, South Carolina in 1881. A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, Columbia

In the world of herbaria, Duke University’s decision to close its herbarium has had a major impact.  Many leaders in the field have risen in defense of these preserved plant collections including Harvard University’s Charles Davis, a leading advocate for herbaria (Davis, 2023), the stellar science writer Carl Zimmer, and Emory University’s Cassandra Quave, author of an award-winning book on ethnobotany (Quave 2022).  National Public Radio’s Meghna Chakrabarti weighed in by interviewing Duke Herbarium director Kathleen Pryer.  In each instance, the stress was rightly put on the importance of these collections in documenting biodiversity and dealing with climate change issues. 

I definitely agree with this emphasis but I see herbaria as making more far-reaching contributions.  Not only are they used by biologists and environmentalists, but by historians, artists, writers, gardeners, and students.  This is not surprising since herbaria can make an important contribution to a community’s culture.  In the NPR presentation, there was a sound bite from Dean of Natural Sciences at Duke Susan Alberts, who compared the herbarium to the university’s library, with both being university repositories, but the library serves the broad community while the herbarium a very small one.  I’d like to note that the library also takes a much larger chunk of Duke’s budget, and an herbarium can serve a significant portion of a university’s community.

In the doing the research for my book, I’ve found that herbaria can have influence in many fields (Flannery, 2023).  One curator in Britain told me that she now has as many requests to view material in the collection from artists and writers as from biologists.  Many departments in her university have come to appreciate the collection as an important learning resource for their students.  The connection to art is a profound one.  The first herbaria date to the mid-16^th century about the same time the first botanic gardens and first printed herbals with good illustrations appeared.  As botanists studied plants, they sought effective ways to communicate their knowledge to others.  Before a good vocabulary of plant terms had developed, visual information was key and remains so.  Today many research articles contain drawings of plants and plant parts because these help to clarify often subtle differences among species.  Herbarium sheets sometimes include not only a pressed plant and label but a sketch, perhaps of an intricate flower part, or even a printed illustration. 

Just as importantly, specimens labels can have crucial cultural information such as indigenous plant names or uses.  This can be valuable in many ways today as natural history collections deal with their connections to past colonization and exploitation of indigenous people (Das & Lowe, 2023).  These data are essential to historians attempting to write a more inclusive history of the movement and use of plants around the world.  Significant work has been done, for example, on the many connections between plant collecting and the slave trade, as well as one the effects of colonial plantation economies (Murphy, 2023).  Specimens are documents as useful to this work as written archives with which they often intersect.  

I volunteer at the herbarium of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where the herbarium curators have worked with the university’s McKissick Museum on an exhibit about Henry Ravenel, a 19^th-century planter and botanist.  More recently, there was collaboration among the museum, the rare book collection, and the herbarium on an exhibit about the plant collector and artist Mark Catesby who arrived in South Carolina in 1722.  The university’s copies of his masterpiece The Natural History of Carolinas, Florida, and the Bahama Islands were displayed along with specimens of the plants pictured in his illustrations.  This exhibit suggests that there is yet another similarity libraries and herbaria:  they are both cultural assets that deserve to be shared broadly with members of the university and the community as a whole. 

I am only scratching the surface of the contributions that herbaria can make.  The curator emeritus at the university’s herbarium is teaching a course on native plants for gardeners and conservationists; in addition, he writes a “Mystery Plant” newspaper column.  The current curator is active on social media (Facebook and Instagram), hosts tours of the herbarium for students and has been known, like his predecessor, to dress as “Plantman” from time to time, all in the service of getting the word out about the collection. 

Herbaria do not lack in importance to many disciplines, but what they have lacked is visibility.  In the past, they tended to be rather insular, accessible only to botanists working on identifying plants and describing new species.  With increased awareness of environmental problems, this picture has changed, especially as collections have been digitized and made available on line.  Not only researchers around the world, but anyone interested in plants can see the wonders of specimens and the information recorded on them.  Curators now realize that to keep their collections alive they need to communicate herbaria’s multitude of values more effectively.  Duke Herbarium’s closure points out the dangers every collection faces, and for so many reasons this shouldn’t be allowed to happen at other institutions.             

I’ll end by mentioning what drew me to studying herbaria:  the specimens are so beautiful and are connected to wonderful stories: about where the plants were found, who preserved them, and how they have been used over the centuries.  Catesby’s collections, now in Britain, are still studied today not only by botanists but by art historians researching the specimens’ connections to his paintings and ethnobotanists interested in what they can reveal about Catesby’s work with indigenous peoples (McBurney, 2021).  The poet Emily Dickinson’s herbarium is at Harvard University and was the subject of a recent literary study on how it reflects and foreshadows her poetry (Cole, 2023). Herbaria are treasures with endless uses.

References

Cole, J. L. (2023). Reading Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 11(2), 239–250.

Das, S., & Lowe, M. (2018). Nature read in black and white: Decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections. Journal of Natural Science Collections, 6, 4–14.

Davis, C. C. (2023). The herbarium of the future. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 38(5), 412–423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.11.015

Flannery, M. C. (2023). In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

McBurney, H. (2021). Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Murphy, K. S. (2023). Captivity’s Collections: Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Quave, C. L. (2021). Plant Hunter. New York: Penguin.

The Herbarium as Manuscript

Iris specimens with painted additions in the Harder Herbarium at Oak Spring Garden Library.

The final library I visited on my recent tour (see earlier posts 1,2,3) is my absolute favorite, the Oak Spring Garden Library in Virginia.  It is the home of Rachel Mellon’s superb collection of plant-related books and art.  It is a beautiful space and all the people I know who are connected with it are absolutely wonderful, from the President of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Peter Crane to its librarian Tony Willis, as well as Kimberley Fisher, Nancy Collins, and Danielle Eady.  They are all great—and the books are too.  On this visit I looked at an illustrated manuscript copy of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur from about 1350 and a 1455 Italian herbal by an unknown artist.  It was a great experience to examine them, but for me, the real treasure in the collection is the Johannes Harder’s 1595 herbarium, which, oddly enough I did not examine on this trip.

I didn’t need to disturb what is a very fragile work because the library is in the process of digitizing its manuscripts, and though they aren’t available online yet, Peter Crane very kindly allowed me to have low resolution images to use for my research.  This is a great relief because I can examine the manuscript’s contents without disturbing its pages.  There’s a great deal to study here, even though most pages have little more than the Latin and German plant names, sometimes with Polish names added at a later date.  I fell in love with this because Harder added watercolor embellishments to most of its pages.  These range from painting-in missing petals to entire flowers, roots, and bulbs.  The most common addition is a clump of grass-covered earth to ground the stem.  His work is not unique.  There are twelve of his father Hieronymus’s herbaria in European institutions as well as one by his brother-in-law Johann Brehe (Skružná  et al., 2022) and at least one more by someone else from the same area in Germany (Dobras, 2013).  Hieronymus seems to have originated the style, and it became one of several early experiments in how best to preserve information about plants from storing illustrations and specimen together to creating nature prints. 

While this experiment didn’t catch on, it is nonetheless fascinating.  It also got me thinking about the herbarium not just as a document of botanical information or as an historical document, which it certainly is, or even as a piece of art, but also as a manuscript.  I am not the only one thinking this way.  Bettina Dietz, a researcher at the University of Erfurt in Germany has written an article on the herbarium as manuscript, in which she focuses not on the specimens themselves but on the written information on the sheets (Dietz, 2024).  After all most manuscripts are seen as written documents, and Dietz doesn’t consider these pages as an exception.  She examines the bound herbaria that the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-1695) created during his years as a medical officer in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.  Two of the volumes have extensive notations by him and by later owners.  There is information on the indigenous language and its script as well as notes on the medicinal uses of the plants and their morphology.  Dietz does a textual analysis similar to what would be done on other manuscripts.  She argues that these writings tell a great deal about both the botanical knowledge and the linguistic skills of the authors.

When I saw her title I was expecting something a little different because for several years I too have been thinking about early herbaria as manuscripts, but from another perspective.  This occurred to me during covid when I read a blog post by a Dutch graduate student Suzette van Haaren who was researching the relationship between the digitized version and the physical one for among other manuscripts the Bury Bible at Cambridge University.  She was at Cambridge, but couldn’t access the “real” bible and wrote about how she navigated that divide.  This intrigued me, and since I had time to think and to explore manuscripts on the web I learned about how they are digitized.  It is a very different process than imaging specimens.  Because of the irregularity in the pages due to staining, warping, and different kinds of images, some with gold embellishments, each page requires individual attention.  Digitizing specimens was about getting good images of as many specimens as possible to the point that it could be done on an assembly line.  Digitizing manuscripts bordered on art and required a different set of skills that would apply to early bound herbaria as well. 

There are many other similarities between manuscripts and bound herbaria dealing not with the text or even with digitization, but with the very materiality to the sheets.  Study of this aspect can tell many stories.  The Harder herbarium pages are watermarked, and a librarian friend was able to trace the mark to a German papermaker of the era and working in an area close to where Harder lived.  The pencil lines on the left and right hand sides of each page suggest that Harder was knowingly imitating the structure of a manuscript’s border, as does the index that has each page divided into three columns with lines in red that also run across the top and bottom of the page.  Harder’s writing is calligraphic with carefully done capital letters, and the watercolor drawings are similar to those in early herbals.  I could go on about the feel of the paper and the look and feel of the well-warn binding with what are left of brass fittings.  It is in this physicality that digitized versions fail miserably, but I am still very grateful for them because how else would I have ever seen the great En Tibi herbarium in Leiden or Ulisse Aldrovandi’s in Bologna.

Note: I am very grateful to everyone at the Oak Spring Garden Library for making my visit so wonderful, as it always is.

References

Dietz, B. (2024). Herbaria as manuscripts: Philology, ethnobotany, and the textual–visual mesh of early modern botany. History of Science, 62(1), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231181285

Dobras, W. (2013). Hieronymus Harder und seine zwölf herbare. Montfort, 65(2), 121–152.

Skružná, J., Pokorná, A., Dobalová, S., & Strnadová, L. (2022). Hortus siccus (1595) of Johann Brehe of Überlingen from the Broumov Benedictine monastery, Czech Republic, re-discovered. Archives of Natural History, 49(2), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.2022.0794

The Library as Herbarium

Rare books and herbarium cabinets in the Special Collections vault at West Chester University.

The title of this post is meant to differentiate it from my last post, “Herbaria in Libraries,” which described bound herbaria kept in library special collections.  There are many of these, particularly in Europe where almost all of the oldest herbaria are found.  The case I want to describe here is different:  an entire herbarium now resides in the West Chester University Francis Harvey Green Library’s Special Collections vault.  It used to be housed in the biology department, but its only botanist was retiring, and the department could wanted to use the space for other purposes.  To anyone familiar with the history of herbaria, this is an all too common story, but here the outcome was not moving the collection to one or more other institutions as usually happens.

One of the reasons for this is that the herbarium, named after William Darlington (1782-1863), houses specimens that are among the oldest in the United States and are closely related to the West Chester area.  Darlington, a native of West Chester, was a physician and botanist, who was also one of the founding members of the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Sciences in 1826.  At the time Chester County already had a rich botanical history since it was home to John Jackson whom I mentioned in the last post and to Humphry Marshall who had a conservatory and botanical garden on his farm and sold North American trees and shrubs to European collectors.  His Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove (1785) was the first botanical book produced in America written by a native-born American on American plants.  Though he died in 1801, his garden remained for some time, and Darlington had plants from there in his herbarium.  He also had specimens collected on the Peirce family forest land, which later became Longwood Gardens and from Bartram’s Garden during the time it was being managed by John Bartram’s descendants (Schneider, 2009). 

When I was beginning my herbarium investigations, I gave a talk at the Botanical Society of America’s annual meeting and afterwards a woman suggested I visit West Chester because they had a great historical collection.  I am very sorry that I don’t recall her name because I would love to thank her for the suggestion.  I first visited in 2012 and the curator Sharon Began was very welcoming and helpful.  I had a wonderful time looking at specimens collected by Constantine Rafinesque, William Baldwin, Elias Durand, and Edward Tuckerman.  But there was more, Darlington corresponded and traded specimens with Charles Short, John Torrey, and Asa Gray in the United States and William Jackson Hooker, Augustin de Candolle, and Carl Agardh in Europe.  He opened correspondence with many of these by sending each a copy of the flora of West Chester that he first published in 1826.

During that same visit, I met McColl who was then technician in the university’s special collections and already had a serious interest in Darlington, who had been a major figure in the life of West Chester well beyond his botanical interests.  He was a physician for most of his career, having studied at the University of Pennsylvania under the botanist Benjamin Barton.  He was also important to the political and economic life of West Chester.  He served three terms as congressman as well as being president of the local bank and railway.  Special Collections has several of his letter books where he copied out his correspondence with such notables as de Candolle and Lady Dalhousie, botany enthusiast and plant collector as well as wife of the Governor General of Canada.  I had a great time, was hooked on learning more ,about Darlington and ended up writing an article about how John Torrey (1853) came to name the pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica after him (Torrey, 1853). 

This required a few more trips to West Chester, but I hadn’t been there in several years and so hadn’t seen the herbarium in its new quarters.  When McColl learned of the biology department’s plans, he did a little measuring and figured out how he could store most of the herbarium’s cabinets in the special collections vault.  They just fit.  Also in the vault are the hundreds of books that were in Darlington’s library, including many of the great botanical resources of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, among them an edition of Linnaeus’s short works that had been given to John Bartram and passed on to Darlington by one of Bartram’s descendants.  This book may have been a gift in recognition of Darlington’s publishing a twin memorial on Humphry Marshall and John Bartram based on papers shared with him by members of both families .  McColl argues that this publication, along with a memorial to the botanist William Baldwin who was a good friend, make him a significant early chronicler of American botany.

What caught my eye on my first visit to the collection were the notes that Darlington had attached to many of his specimens, including some that were of personal importance.  One was on a specimen of Darlingtonia brachyloba, a plant de Candolle had named after him.  It was collected in 1847 from “the tomb of my blessed wife.”  He did not note that this name had been synonymized to Desmanthus brachyloba (now Desmanthus illinoensis) in a 1841 publication by the British botanist George Bentham, even though he knew all about it.  When Torrey told him of naming the pitcher plant after him, he wrote back to him fearful that the “odious” George Bentham would do the same to this plant since he had just published a description of a new pitcher plant.  In the herbarium there’s a copy of the Torrey’s publication of the species and a letter from him assuring Darlington that the name was safe.  Torrey even went to the trouble of including a tracing of the illustration in Bentham’s paper, along with a copy of the legend.  I think you can see that Darlington’s herbarium is as much archive as herbarium and has found an appropriate home where, I might add, McColl has had the entire collection digitized over the past few years.

Notes: I am very grateful to Ron McColl for taking the time to show me so many treasures.

References

Schneider, W. M., & Potvin, M. A. (2009). The historic Bartram’s (Carr’s) Garden Collection in West Chester University’s William Darlington Herbarium (DWC). Bartonia, 64, 45–54.

Torrey, J. (1853). On the Darlingtonia californica, a new pitcher-plant from northern California (pp. 1–11). Smithsonian Institution. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/15291

Herbaria in Libraries

Title page of John Jackson’s herbarium given to Francis Alison. Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.

In this post on herbaria and libraries, I’ll look at cases, and there are many, where herbaria are found in archival collections.  These are usually bound, like books, and of more historical than scientific interest, though that is changing somewhat now.  The 16 volumes of the Italian botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 16^th century collection at the University of Bologna have been deconstructed for conservation reasons and the sheets stored in archival boxes.  They have also been the subject of a recent study where the species, most collected around Bologna, were compared with those growing in the same area in the 19^th and 21^st centuries (Buldrini et al., 2023). 

Here I want to look at a few herbaria that aren’t nearly as old but still fascinating.  As I mentioned in the last post, I visited the University of Delaware in February and while I was there I was able to see treasures from its Special Collections.  My guides were Manuscripts Librarian Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Senior Research Fellow Mark Samuels Lasner.  We met in the room housing the Lasner Collection of books, art, and other materials from the Victorian era.  It’s furnished with bookcases and two long tables in William Morris style down to the Morris-inspired fabric on the chair cushions.  One table displayed items from Lasner’s and the library’s collection of Charles Darwin-related material, since I had been invited to speak at an event as part of the university’s Darwin Day celebrations.  There was wonderful material including early editions of many of Darwin’s books.  Lasner had a page of The Various Contrivances by which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862) opened to one of the beautiful lithographs done by George Sowerby II, who had spent 10 days at Darwin’s home working on these illustrations, leaving Darwin at the end “half-dead” (Costa & Angell, 2023).  My favorite piece in Lasner’s display was a 19th-century cartoon by Joseph Keppler from the humor magazine Puck:  Darwin and a pantheon of great minds are highlighted against the enemies of science.  It is labeled “Reason Against Unreason” and seems very timely. 

Before my visit, I had asked Melvin if I could see the herbaria of John Jackson (1748-1821), but she had already put them on her list of items to show me.  They contain plants collected by Jackson at and around his botanical garden and farm, Harmony Grove, in Chester County, Pennsylvania.  I had first encountered him, or at least one of his specimens, in the collection of the physician and botanist William Darlington (1782-1863), which is at West Chester University and is the subject of my next post.  This specimen has a note from Darlington explaining that the plant had come from Jackson’s garden and had been grown from seeds brought back from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  That intrigued me and so I looked up Jackson, discovered where his herbarium was kept, and took this opportunity to get a look at it.  There are two albums; the thin one with a lovely title page dedicating it to Jackson’s neighbor, the physician Francis Alison.  The larger album has no dedication, but I found a specimen collected by Darlington when his initials WD, which he often used, caught my eye.  It was like meeting an old friend.  Because of the fragility of the paper, I didn’t examine every page, but I got a good sense of the care Jackson took in making the collection.  He was a generation older than Darlington, but they were both Quakers living in an area steeped in the study of natural history and especially botany.  The next day, I went to Special Collections at Swarthmore College, where there is a collection of papers relating to Jackson and his relatives.  I found little about his interest in botany, but did come upon a surprise:  a small notebook filled with plant specimens, each numbered and labeled with common names.  It is dated 1833-1866, but the creator is unknown.  It might be a young person’s collection; it was a surprising little jewel revealing the family’s continued interest in plants.

Melvin also had on display notebooks created by Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her sister Margaretta who were  19^th century naturalists in Philadelphia.  Elizabeth was particularly interested in botany while Margaretta focused on entomology.  They both corresponded with leading scientists in their respective fields, and for Elizabeth that included Asa Gray and Darlington who encouraged the work done by both sisters.  Each one created notebooks that can only be described as exquisite.  Elizabeth painted exceptionally fine paintings of plants and also landscapes; these were interspersed among poems done in fine calligraphy.  Catherine McNeur (2023) has recently written an interesting book on the pair, arguing that they had a significant influence on the development of natural history in the United States.

Next to the notebooks were two student herbaria done by an African-American sister and brother, Anna and Arthur Dickenson in Xenia, Ohio in the early 20^th century.  They had carefully filled in the information in their printed herbarium workbooks and added the specimens, making these good examples of what once was relatively common in American education, in this case in a segregated school.  The final item on display was one I knew about but had never seen and consequently had not fully appreciated.  It is the artist book The Arctic Plants of New York City created by James Walsh (2016).  At least a decade ago on a snowy night in Brooklyn, I had attended the opening of a show of his work.  Though he hadn’t yet produced his book, his theme at the time was Arctic plants, by which he meant those that grew in northern Europe and were brought to the New World by European colonists, and some became weeds here.  At the exhibit, the specimens were on the wall.  In the book they are meticulously mounted, one on a page, with key words printed around each and more information on the opposite page.  The “page” for each plant is heavy cardstock with a mat around the specimen, giving it even more depth.  It is indeed an art book—and an herbarium. 

Note: I want to thank John Jungck for the invitation to speak at the University of Delaware and to Karn Rosenberg for her many kindnesses during the visit. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Mark Samuels Lasner for sharing their treasures and expertise with me. Finally, thanks to so many kind people who made my time at the university so wonderful.

References

Buldrini, F., Alessandrini, A., Mossetti, U., Muzzi, E., Pezzi, G., Soldano, A., & Nascimbene, J. (2023). Botanical memory: Five centuries of floristic changes revealed by a Renaissance herbarium (Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1551–1586). Royal Society Open Science, 10(11), 230866. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230866

Costa, J. T., & Angell, B. (2023). Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

McNeur, C. (2023). Mischievous Creatures. New York: Basic Books.

Walsh, J. (2016). The Artic Plants of New York City. New York: Granary.

Herbaria as Libraries

Specimen of Lysimachia lutea in Vol 5 of the Felix Platter Herbarium at the Bern City Library.

I’ve always found the connection between libraries and herbaria intriguing.  I’ve wanted to write about it and now seems a good time because a few weeks ago I went to four libraries in three days as part of what I consider a whirlwind trip to Delaware.  I was invited to speak as part of the annual Darwin Day celebration at the University of Delaware and visited its library’s Special Collections.  I drove up from South Carolina because I wanted to also go to libraries at Swarthmore College, West Chester University, and Oak Spring Garden.  Not surprisingly, all these institutions’ libraries house herbaria in one form or another, and I’ll describe them in this series of posts.   

I’ll begin with the most obvious similarities between libraries and herbaria, and then use the collections I saw to dig into some intriguing connections between the two.  Libraries and herbaria are both repositories for information on paper.  Early herbaria were often bound like other paper leaves would be, but this practice was eventually given up because it made the rearrangement of specimens into groups of similar species difficult.  So herbarium sheets, now usually unbound and kept in folders, are stored horizontally, and the same is true of most bound volumes.  The latter include exsiccatae or published herbaria, many from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries that were collections of specimens with printed labels.  These were gathered by professional plant hunters who often preserved 20 or more specimens of a species and served as a source of income for many collectors. 

There are a number of ways in which the mechanics of a library and an herbarium are similar.  Their holdings are catalogued and stored in an orderly arrangement so items can be easily retrieved.  Over the centuries, libraries on the whole have been better at this than herbaria.  Usually, each book or periodical acquired is recorded, given an identifier, and shelved according to some classification system.  The same is true of many herbarium sheets, however the recording system was often not as foolproof.  Libraries usually log in their book acquisitions shortly after arrival, though if an entire collection is acquired this may take some time.  Herbaria are more likely to have major backlogs.  When the herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris was renovated, curators found 800,000 unmounted and often unidentified specimens.  This represented roughly 10% of the entire collection (Le Bras et al., 2017).  According to a manager of the project, there were piles, packages, and boxes everywhere, many over a century old. 

It’s rare to find an herbarium without a backlog.  Many have boxes of unprocessed specimens stored on top of cabinets, glaring down on overworked staff.  This is one reason why so many new species are found among already collected material.  Now it is true that libraries do sometimes find hidden gems, especially in archives where backlogs are more likely.  European libraries are particularly prone to this problem because they often store much older material that may be unexamined for centuries.  That’s why wonderful finds are sometimes made including eight volumes of the Swiss physician Felix Platter’s (1536-1614) herbarium found at the University of Bern’s Institute of Plant Sciences in 1930 (Rytz, 1936).  It has now been beautifully curated at the Bern City Library.

One of the reasons a number of discoveries, both in herbaria and libraries, have been made over the past few decades is because both these types of institutions have had massive digitization projects.  Here the libraries have been in the vanguard since library science as a discipline was revolutionized beginning in the 1960s.  The creation of library databases was key to the development of the very concept of a database, and librarians became early adopters of innovations in information technology.  I worked for many years at an institution with a computer science program and an IT department, but I gained most of my knowledge about databases and metadata from librarians because they had not only technical expertise but communication skills—and the patience of Job.

In many cases, herbarium curators particularly at smaller institutions also learned about information technology from librarians.  The latter had both the skill and the necessary tools.  By the 1980s, libraries had scanners and were beginning to image books.  Since most herbarium specimens were flat sheets, they could be treated in a similar way.  In some cases, the herbaria also used library software to store information, though this was less than ideal because the metadata fields were often inadequate.  But still, many libraries provide the first support for herbaria that then began to learn from other natural history collections as support from NSF grew for digitization projects. 

One way many libraries differ from many herbaria is in encouraging access.  For the most part, herbaria have been worlds closed off from the public, while libraries foster traffic, though special collections housing rare books are more in the herbarium mold, usually limiting visits to those with a stated reason involving research.  I’d like to end with one more similarity, I have found both libraries and herbaria to be places where the staff are geared to being helpful.  They are stewards of rich resources that they care deeply about and have the expertise to help visitors use them.  They love their collections and also know so much about them.  Both types of institutions are also places of peace where we can think about the riches with which we are surrounded.

Note: I want to thank the many librarians who contributed information to these posts, and especially to Ron McColl, Special Collections Librarian at the Francis Harvey Green Library at West Chester University for his insights and comments.

References

Le Bras, G., et al. (2017). The French Muséum national d’histoire naturelle vascular plant herbarium collection dataset. Scientific Data, 4(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.16

Rytz, W. (1936). Pflanzenaquarelle des Hans Weiditz aus dem Jahre 1529. Bern: Haupt.

Outreach in Finland

Linaria vulgaris (yellow toadflax) collected by Elias Lönnrot in 1860 in South Häme, Finland; Herbarium TUR

At the back of each issue of Taxon, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, there’s a section called “Plant Systematics World” edited by Sandra Knapp and Jun Wen.  In the October 2023 issue, there was an article by Finnish researchers (Lehtonen et al., 2023) telling of the celebrations around the 100th anniversary of the founding of the herbarium at the University of Turku (TUR).  It enthusiastically describes the herbarium’s history and present-day activities through the lens of the events, exhibits, and online media developed for the occasion.  These are great examples of herbarium outreach, something that’s on the minds of many in the herbarium world who are attempting to increase their institutions’ place in the public consciousness.

TUR became a physical reality in 1922, two years after the founding of the university.  A little history is needed here.  From the 13^th century, Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 when it became part of Russia until declaring its independence in 1917 during the Russian revolution.  In Helsinki, the nation’s capital, the official language at the time was Swedish, but at the new institution it was Finnish.  Thus it was significant that one of the founding collections for the herbarium was that of Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who wrote a poem based on Finnish folklore and myths and also helped develop Finnish as a cohesive language, part of a national awakening.  With a great interest in plants and language, he created Finnish botanical terminology, most of which is still in use.  In addition, he published the first book in Finnish on the country’s flora.  As part of the anniversary celebration, the 750 extant specimens from Lönnrot’s herbarium were digitized and made available online, and this was given media attention:  one of the hallmarks of outreach.

Lönnrot is a great example of how herbarium history intertwines with culture and politics.  Another case occurred during World War II when Finland staved off a Soviet attempt to invade the country and went on to annex the Karelia region from the Soviets.  In an effort to make a case for East Karelia as botanically part of Finland not Russia, researchers from the University of Turku studied the region’s flora.  One of the participants was Lauri Kari, a pioneer in color photography.  Many of his slides were included in an online exhibit about Finnish botany during the war.  The interest in this presentation, which had also been given media attention, was so great that the website crashed on the first day.

The article gives the sense that present-day curators of the collection’s heritage are very aware of it and want their fellow citizens to know about it.  There were several physical as well as virtual anniversary events.  The first was a BioBlitz on the university’s campus in May 2022.  Next was an exhibit on Seili Island off the coast of Turku where the university has as biodiversity research unit that encourages ecotourism.  In the distant past, the island served as a refuge for lepers and later as a mental hospital.  Many of the old wooden buildings remain, and one was the site of a display on the herbarium’s activities. 

Later the presentation was expanded and moved to Turku’s main library, with material from the herbarium collection.  There were interactive displays including a puzzle on assembling a plant plastome genome and a balsa log which children could try to lift to show their strength.  Needless to say botanical art was represented, including old botany charts and anatomical plant models.  These were accompanied by examples of student herbaria.  Until 1969, making an herbarium was a mandatory part of the Finnish school curriculum, so some visitors had memories of this activity and a number had even kept to their collections.  Some younger visitors also have such memories because the requirement was reinstated in 2004, though now a school can decide whether to require a physical collection or an digital one.  To me this says a lot about the place of plants in Finnish culture and what Finns value. 

The library exhibit was accompanied by a series of eight lectures that were also available digitally.  They dealt with the research activities of the university’s Biodiversity Unit that houses the herbarium.  The most popular talk was given by Kati Pihlaja a researcher in the herbarium who spoke about the mistletoe Viscum album and its presence in Turku over recent years.  Its spread is being tracked with the help of a community or citizen science project, yet another form of outreach.  Another session dealt with a project to develop a Flora of Turku, and there was one on using herbarium specimens to assess endangered species.  The program planners knew their audience and so included a presentation on indoor molds and wood-rooting fungi that are a special problem in a country with so many wooden structures. 

I felt invigorated when I finished reading this short article.  It was exciting to read about an herbarium that is focused on its history and its cultural significance as well as on botany.  It is also one that is definitely looking to the future in terms of its research agenda as well as its use of social media and digitization of its collection.  This outreach in many different directions seems to me exemplary, though I’m aware that it’s hardly unique.  Herbaria worldwide are adopting such practices as they become increasingly aware of the important contributions they can make to the community at large and even to national identity. Examples of these initiatives will be the focus of the remaining posts in this series.

Reference

Lehtonen, S., Cárdenas, G. G., Huhtinen, S., Huttunen, S., Keskiniva, V., Kosonen, T., Kuusisto, I., Lampinen, J., Lempiäinen-Avci, M., Llerena, N., Luong, T. T., Marsh, T., Oksanen, H., Pihlaja, K., Puolasmaa, A., Riikonen, R., Toivonen, M., & Wahlsten, A. (2023). Herbarium TUR celebrates its 100 years. TAXON, 72(5), 1196–1198. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.13069

Hidden Collections: Student Work

In the other posts in this series (1,2,3) I’ve discussed remarkable herbaria and other botanical treasures in a variety of institutions including very old collections and those of giants in the history of botany such as Carl Linnaeus and Alexander von Humboldt.  Now I want to look at very different kinds of herbaria, those created by students, many of whom didn’t carry on with botanical work, but still left carefully prepared specimens that can be of value today for scientific, historical, cultural, and emotional reasons.  Many of these herbaria date from the 19^th century when natural history was often a significant part of school curricula (Barber, 1980).  Depending upon institutional curation policies, many herbaria, botanical libraries, and educational institutions have these items, often stored away and unstudied.

That was the case with specimens kept in the biology department at the College of New Jersey.  Wendy Clement, a plant systematist there, found the collection of 450 specimens during a renovation project.  It was created at the end of the 19^th century by three students including Nelson H. Pepper who gathered more than a hundred plants in 1892; some were exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.  The other two students were Sarah Kandle and Margaret Todd; like Pepper, they were taught by Austin Apgar, professor of botany and author of Trees of the Northern United States: Their Study, Description and Determination (1892).  Clement (2020) has written an article about the collection (TCNJ) and how she is using it with her students for comparative studies on species found in the area today.  They are also adding specimens to what has become an official herbarium registered in Index Herbariorum, a great example of the continuing value of even small, old collections.  This is one that has now been remounted on acid-free paper and the specimens digitized and made available online.

Renovation and digitization projects are also bringing other student herbaria out of archival darkness.  The specimens in the massive herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew are now being digitized, and one of the finds revealed in this process is the Giles Herbarium, the subject of a Kew blogpost.  Frank Giles was a 19-year-old student who collected 150 specimens, neatly pressed and labeled.  The collection includes a notation:  “The specimens which accompany this note were collected by myself between the 1^st day of January 1895 and the first day of July 1896, and were named and arranged without any assistance than that derived from books.”  The note was signed by Giles and countersigned by his father, the local druggist.  This definitely hints at the collection as a school assignment.  Giles did not go on to be a botanist, but a dentist.  He and his family took good care of the herbarium, and eventually his descendants donated it to Kew.  It provides a slice of ecological history:  the plants that were growing near the coastline of Kent in the late 19^th century.

Donations by later generations are usually how these herbaria find their way into collections, indicating that people still appreciate the time and care put into these endeavors.  At time the collections may even inspire further collecting.  This is the case with a Dutch herbarium.  Doenja Oogjes writes of finding a small notebook with over 50 specimens—tree leaves, weeds, and flowering plants—carefully taped in place by her grandfather in 1933.  These were all gathered in Amsterdam.  Since he noted where he made the collections, Oogjes decided to retrace his steps and attempt to find the same species, focusing particularly on the trees.  She writes:  “His notations have become my instructions.” 

One of my strategies to keep up with what’s going on in the herbarium world is to get a Google Scholar Alert, a regular digest of new items appearing on Google Scholar that include the word “herbarium.”  Most of these items are references to published articles, but there can be a sprinkling of other sources, such as abstracts of conference presentations.  This is how I found Oogjes’s description of her project.  She teaches industrial design at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and was presenting at a conference called Designing Interactive Systems.  She has an interest in human-computer interactions, and she weaves this into her description of how she worked on her herbarium.  This is definitely a different riff on making an herbarium and suggests that there is interest in the concept well beyond the botanical world.

Oogjie writes of her collecting as a “reenactment” of her grandfather’s project.  She found that it gave her the opportunity to engage in a different way with Amsterdam’s trees and flora and experience this milieu more deeply.  This was also true with the process of arranging the specimens on pieces of paper and pressing them.  She was particularly intent on searching for elms, since her grandfather had collected many elm leaves from a number of different collections.  This in itself was a reminder of how much things have changed because elms have almost disappeared due to Dutch elm disease.  In the process of her hunting for elms, she found an app with a data set of trees managed by the city and set out to explore them.  She had connected her walking and pressing project with a data set, something she was very comfortable with, suggesting that there are many ways of linking herbaria to other aspects of life.

References

Barber, L. (1980). The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Clement, W. L. (2020). New Life for Old Collections. Arnoldia, 78(1), 2–5.

Hidden Collections: The Linnean Society

Page from Frank Nicolls’s manuscript MS/24 at the Linnean Society, London.

It might seem odd to feature the Linnean Society under the heading “hidden collections.”  After all, it holds the bulk of Carl Linnaeus’s plants specimens, which could arguably be called the most important herbarium in the world because of its numerous types and its link to the father of modern botanical nomenclature.  But that fame tends to overshadow many other treasures in the society’s collections, including other specimens owned by Linnaeus:  insects, fish, shells, and even pearls, which he cultured in mussels.  James Edward Smith, founder of the LS, had an herbarium of over 25,000 specimens also at the LS along with a significant carpological collection that has been curated recently.

Besides specimens, the LS has a wealth of other materials, so many that it seems to be an endless storehouse of intriguing items.  The society has been doing a good job, via its website, guide to searching its collections, social media presence, and publications of making its archives better known, and that’s really what I want to focus on here.  The Linnean Lens series of presentations is a good place to start.  It was the brainchild of the LS librarian Will Beharrell.  Each installment is fascinating, but my favorite was probably that highlighting Richard Dreyer’s copy of James Smith’s Flora Britannica which he “illustrated” with remarkable watercolors of the species described.  It is a beautiful book to see, and also a record of the passion and skill of one plant lover.  There’s also a Lens video dealing with a special LS treasure: Charles Darwin’s vasculum. 

Another way into the collection is through the issues of two LS periodicals.  PuLSe, a quarterly magazine for Fellows of the Linnean Society, was published between 2009 and 2021.  Many of the articles are still very relevant and are available online.  Some deal with how the LS collections intersect with those of other institutions.  This is really what makes the history of science so fascinating and also so frustrating.  Following a lead often results in either a dead end, or one that involves searching another archive.  Edwin Rose, then a Cambridge Fellow working at the Cambridge Herbarium with curator Lauren Gardiner, dug into the work of John Martyn (1699-1768), who was a Cambridge professor of botany and donated his 25,000 specimens and 300 botanical volumes to Cambridge.  Martyn had contact with Linnaeus, who sent him a copy of his early publication Critica Botanica soon after its 1737 publication.  When Martyn retired in 1763, his son Thomas succeeded him and added Linnaean bonomials to the older names his father recorded.

The LS periodical The Linnean continues to be published three times a year and is also available online.  In a recent issue, there was an article about another treasure, a notebook filled with plant descriptions and illustrations.  As with many old manuscripts, attribution isn’t clear because there is no title page with an author’s name.  However, found between the pages was a bill to a Frank Nicholls with notes on the reverse side suggesting that he might be the owner since he was a physician; at the time that often meant an interest in plants.  Xinyi Wen has written a wonder article about the notebook, highlighting the fact that its organization is a bit unusual.  The plant illustrations are arranged parallel to the handwritten descriptions, rather than perpendicular to them as is standard.  It appears that Nicholls left space to include the drawings, which in some cases intrude into the writing.  There is also a Linnean Lens video on this item, if you want to get a sense of what it looks like.  Similar to Richard Dryer’s watercolors in a botany text, this is a unique expression of an interest in documenting plants. 

I have gotten near the end of this post and feel discouraged because I have yet to mention several other significant aspects of the LS collections.  There are Alfred Russel Wallace’s notebooks, including the manuscript for his book on palms, another Lens topic.  As for botanical art, there are two significant collections online.  The first is that of Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762-1829) including paintings by indigenous artists of the plants he collected in Nepal and India.  Another large archive belonged to Alexander Anderson (1748-1811), who served for many years as director of the botanical garden on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent.  This includes manuscripts as well as watercolors of the plants in the garden by local artists, most unnamed.  However, researchers have identified John Tyley, a descendent of African slaves brought to the island, as one of the most talented of these artists, and recently the LS has acquired another one of his works.

I’ll end with one of my favorite items at LS, though it isn’t digitized.  It is a set of watercolors created for a paper by James Philip Weale on South African plants.  Having been communicated by Charles Darwin, the paper was read at a 1870 LS meeting.  The artist is unknown, but what I find interesting is that Weale also included pressed plant material on ten of the works.  The artwork definitely predominates, but it is intriguing that he felt the need to include some evidence of the plants themselves.  It is more common to find herbarium sheets with sketches of plant parts.  In both cases, art and nature are intertwined to tell more about the species under study.

Hidden Collections: Delessert

Specimen from the Hermann Herbarium in the Delessert Collection at the Institut de France in Paris

Continuing with this series’ theme of lesser known herbaria, the library of the Institut de France in Paris has many treasures, among them the botanical library of Benjamin Delessert (1773-1847), a French banker and naturalist.  During his lifetime he accumulated a herbarium of about a quarter of a million specimens.  He left this to the herbarium in Geneva where the Delessert family was then based and where his friend the great botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle had moved after leaving France.  He bequeathed left his library of about 8,000 volumes, including many botanical works, to his brother François, who in turn deposited it 20 years later in the Institut de France because both brothers had been members of the Institut’s Académie Française.  This explains how two significant herbaria, both bound, ended up at the Institut, where they have been beautifully conserved and digitized.  The Institut has a website providing access to all fifteen botanical items in the Delessert collection that have been digitized. 

The first gem is one of the volumes of plants collected by the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-1695) during several years of the mid-1670s that he spent as a physician for the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  Other Hermann volumes are part of the Sloane Herbarium at the Museum of Natural History, London and are also digitized.  Besides the plants, usually one to a page, there are often insects, particularly butterflies, attached.  Typical of Dutch herbaria of that era, many of the plants have elaborate printed labels and the tips of the stems are covered with either such a label, or more commonly with a printed urn.  Long, thin printed scrolls were used to hold down specimens much as tape is today; there are even a few small snake prints use to attach the plants.  Also on the sheets are a great number of notes in many different hands, indicating that the collection was well-studied.

Perhaps even more significant is a smaller herbarium, one created by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).  It contains the plants he collected on his trip to Lapland in 1732 and described in Flora Lapponica.  There are 379 plants in the collection, usually two on a page, each attached to a small sheet of paper.  Brief notations give the name of the plant and the reference to it in Linnaeus’s journal; he was a master of organization from his early years.  Since he described many new species collected on this trip, this herbarium has important taxonomic significance.  It wasn’t included in the materials that Linnaeus’s wife Sara Elisabeth Moræa sold to the British botanist James Edward Smith and are now in the Linnean Society because Linnaeus had given it to his friend, the Dutch botanist Johannes Burman.  Delessert had purchased Burman’s library, and so this treasure eventually landed in the Institut, because it was bound.

Besides these two treasures, there is also something of a botanical oddity, again a bound volume.  It contains 252 sheets of nature prints made by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland during their South American expedition.  They had great difficulty pressing and preserving plants.  The damp climate made it almost impossible to dry specimens before they rotted, and if mold didn’t destroy them, insects often did.  Considering that they returned with thousands of specimens, the team obviously had many successes, but at one point they were discouraged enough to try a different method:  inking the flattened plants and pressing them between sheets of paper to make prints.  It was even more tedious than pressing, but at least the fruits of this method were of little interest to bugs.

The other dozen items in the Institut’s Delessert collection that have been digitized are all volumes of botanical art and they are spectacular.  Benjamin Delessert obviously had an eye for quality and the means to purchase fine works, but also ones that are significant to botanical history.  The oldest collection has eight volumes of images made or commissioned by the Italian naturalist Federico Cesi.  Five are primarily watercolors of flowering plants, three are of fungi.  Cesi was a founder of the Academy of the Lynxes which had the mission of studying the natural world and publishing on it.  Many of their more ambitious plans were never realized but Cesi did a tremendous amount of work documenting plants as well as animals and was more interested in fungi than most naturalists of that time.  These volumes are part of the Paper Museum of Cassiano del Pozza (1588-1657).  He was one of Cesi’s contemporaries and Cesi’s work after his death.  Many of the volumes are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, having been purchased by King George III, but there are materials in other collections including Delessert’s.

Also at the Institut are three volumes of plant paintings by the French botanist Charles Plumier.  They depict plants he gathered on during the trip financed by the King of France to French-held islands in the Caribbean, primarily Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Santo Domingo.  Plumier brought back hundreds of drawings, and these along with many of the engravings he made from them are preserved in this collection.  And I can’t end without mentioning the collection of Chinese botanical paintings collected by the French missionary Pierre-Martial Cibot.  There are over 400 sheets of rice paper with Chinese notations; they are a wonder to look at. There are additional pages of notes written by Cibot. 

Hidden Collections

Page from an herbarium of medicinal plants from the Franciscan monastery in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

Here are a great many herbaria, about 3100 are listed in the Index Herbariorum, the standard reference on plant collections worldwide.  However, there are many others outside this listing particularly older collections, many of them bound and stored in libraries and museums as well as in institutional herbaria.  Sometimes it takes a little digging to find these.  This series of posts is about some that I’ve unearthed.

I have to admit that I had never really explored the massive Google Arts and Culture (GAC) site, only visiting when I’d learned about specific sites like those for the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Dumbarton Oaks.  When I typed “herbarium” into the GAC search box I got 48 sites, and looked at everyone one of them.  In some there was only a slide or two on herbaria, but several were gold mines, including one from the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, Herbaria Antiqua that features several collections. 

The oldest herbarium in the Reggio Emilia museums is “Erborario Naturale del Santo Spirito di Reggio” and dates from the mid-17^th century (see above).  The specimens are kept in place with pieces of ribbon and strips of cloth, the hand writing is elaborate, and the pages are bordered in red ink.  There are some notes on the medicinal uses of the plants.  The site includes several closeups of the sheets, as is the case with the other herbaria presented here.  It really gives a sense of paging through these treasures.  Also on this site is the herbarium of Giacomo Zanoni (1615-1682), director of the Botanical Garden at the University of Bologna for more than 40 years.  The collection is unbound and includes 184 plants, each with a paper strip usually giving the plant’s common name in simple calligraphy with a few flourishes.  The highpoint for me on this site was Filippo Re’s herbarium.  He taught agricultural botany, so there are many domesticated plants among the 7214 sheets, some with references for the plant name.  The presentation highlights grain specimens held in place with pins, a practice used in Italian herbaria well into the 20^th century. 

There are also GAC presentations from the Parma University Botanical Garden.  The first deals with the garden itself and gives an overview of some of its herbarium collections.  Parma and Reggio Emilia are within about an hour’s drive of Bologna, where the botanist Luca Ghini, one of the earliest proponents of herbaria, taught for many years.  His successor at the University of Bologna was Ulisse Aldrovandi who had a massive herbarium, a dozen of its volumes are still preserved there along with volumes of botanical art.  Obviously, the region values its botanical collections.  Parma holds the herbarium of Luigi Gardoni, a mid-19^th century pharmacist.  It has over 10,000 sheets as well as 447 boxes of plant materials such as seeds and resins, as well as advertisements, printed material, and notes.  There are two GAC sites for this herbarium, one for specimens and a second for ancillary material.  The explanatory captions on these sites are more extensive than on most; they give a good sense of the collection and of the mind of the collector, who was obviously committed to documenting his life in pharmacy. 

These sites were developed as offshoots of a larger project to digitize Gardoni’s specimens.  Digitization seems to be an engine driving the rediscovery of many older herbaria, and their value as historical as well as botanical documents is becoming more apparent.  Remember, I found this material on an arts and culture site.  It definitely documents what pharmacy was like in northern Italy in the 19^th century.  Pharmacies were where people could find plants for a variety of uses.  Gardoni notes that Gypsophyla struthium, a source of saponins,was good for washing fine garments, and Delphinium flowers were used for dying sugar blue for cake icing.  He seemed to save everything, and so his files are a wonderful source of background information.  Admittedly, the specimens themselves do not provide much data on when or where they were collected, and he is more interested in a plant’s medicinal uses than in any other kind of information, but still these online exhibits are worth attention.

There are also other collections worth looking at including that of the Marquise Marianna Panciatichi Ximenes of Aragon Paulucci presented by the Science and Technology Foundation in Florence.  Her father had been interested in growing exotic plants on their Tuscan estates, and she became a serious plant collector from 1880 to 1898.  There are 4153 sheets in her herbarium, most specimens are from around Tuscany and most of the remainder from within Italy.  They are neatly labeled and show that the Marquise was serious about her work.  Another serious natural history enterprise in Italy is the Academy of Physiocritics (the Fisiocritici), which is now part of the Sienese Museums.  This site is full of photos of the academy’s impressive building and collections; the emphasis here is not too much on botany but it’s still fascinating.

Before ending I should mention at least one site that is not Italian, though the Italian botanical community seems to have used GAC to particularly good advantage.  So has the London Heritage Council of London, Ontario.  It highlights several institutions including Eldon House with its 12-volume herbarium of Robert Ronalds, a member of a British family of nurserymen, who opened a nursery in Ontario.  He created the collection between 1817 and 1822, and it’s beautifully preserved in a custom-built mahogany cabinet.  I think it is interesting that London Heritage Council, which includes many institutions, should highlight this collection:  a good sign for increased awareness of herbaria.