Decolonizing Collections

One of James Petiver’s publications where he cited the collectors who provided him with specimens

Over the past year I have spent more time than usual on social media and Zoom presentations.  Since I am interested in plant collections, I tend to come across programs related to natural history museums.  A persistent theme that has gotten even more attention since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, is the idea of decolonizing collections.  This is hardly a new concept, but events have made it a more obvious and pressing concern.  Because so many institutions were physically closed, curators and the public had a chance to step back and ask questions about the future of collections and how they are used.

I hesitate to even broach this topic because I am an old, white woman who some would consider privileged:  educated and comfortably retired.  Despite my limit perspective, I am writing about this issue because I can’t not write about it.  One Zoom presentation I attended was sponsored by the Digital Library Federation and featured staff from New York Botanical Garden .  Regina Vitiello, project coordinator for the garden’s Steere Herbarium, discussed the issue of labels with place names that would now be considered culturally inappropriate.  There are a number of issues here ranging from who finds these—is it enough just to wait until someone happens upon a problem or should curators be actively searching for them.  Then, who decides they are inappropriate and what to do about them:  are they expunged—both on the specimen and online—or are they left, but with a notation.  Vitiello notes that this work becomes a communal project within the herbarium, requiring discussions among those responsible for the collection.

Rashad Bell, collections maintenance associate at the NYBG Mertz Library, covered similar issues with the library catalogue.  In searching for items for a patron, he found a 1950 biography of George Washington Carver called The Ebony Scientist, a title that would not even be considered today.  However, the book is still a useful resource, so it should remain in the collection and in the online catalogue.  What, if any, notation should be made on the entry?  Neither Bell nor Vitiello had answers for all the questions they probed, but that is in part what made their presentation useful.  It showed the layers of examination and work involved in actually opening up collections, laying out how they reflect past cultural influences, and what is involved in making them more welcoming to all.

Bell also participated in a presentation at Science Museum Fridays at New York University.  The session was called Decolonizing Living Collections and also included Laura Briscoe, NYBG herbarium collections manager.  After the event,  Bell and Nuala P. Caomhánach wrote about interviews with the participants for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog (1,2).  They are worth reading to get a sense of the complexity of the issues involved.

“Decolonizing collections” can mean many things but a major thrust is to ask new questions of what is available, including what collections and their attendant archives can reveal about the role of indigenous and enslaved peoples in building them.  One collection that is receiving special scrutiny is that of Hans Sloane, the British physician who assembled not only a large herbarium but also books, art, coins, anthropological and zoological materials from around the world, that became the founding collection of the British Museum (see last post).  Sloane’s wealth came in part from his marrying a wealthy widow who had inherited her husband’s Jamaican plantations that employed enslaved people.  Sloane met her while he was physician to Jamaica’s British governor and spent his spare time amassing a natural history collection.  He was aided by British landowners as well as indigenous and enslaved people.  The latter two groups were those most engaged with the land and its organisms (Delbourgo, 2017).  Careful scrutiny of Sloane’s letters and notebooks could reveal interactions and information not recorded in his Natural History of Jamaica.

Sloane’s herbarium is composed of collections by over 280 individuals, with the most specimens coming from James Petiver who himself had acquired 100 herbaria and had a network of collectors around the world.  Important sources were the captains and surgeons on slave ships that sailed a triangular route from Britain to Africa carrying goods that were sold there and then conveying enslaved Africans to be sold in the West Indies and from there in the American colonies.  On the return trip, the ships carried sugar, coffee, and tobacco to Britain.  Though Petiver’s collection had a worldwide scope, the geography of slavery shaped it in that many of his specimens came from West Africa, the Caribbean, and southern American colonies.  The role of slavery here is now being more carefully scrutinized along with other colonization practices (Murphy, 2020).

Petiver published regularly, describing new species that his network had sent him .  He rewarded contributors by mentioning their names in print, but needless to say, the names of many who had actually found the plants and imparted information about them are forgotten.  (see image above)  To me, this is what decolonizing collections is about, attempting to unearth the people and information that never made it into publications.  In most cases, names are lost, but hidden in the archives are references to where collectors obtained plants and plant stories, some of them about a species’ uses or religious significance.

References

Delbourgo, J. (2017). Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Murphy, K. S. (2020). James Petiver’s ‘Kind Friends’ and ‘Curious Persons’ in the Atlantic World: Commerce, colonialism and collecting. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 74(2), 259–274. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0011

Note:  I would like to thank Ray Pun, instruction/research librarian at the Alder Graduate School of Education in California, for providing the link to the Digital Library  Federation presentation from NYBG.  This is only one of many resources he has pointed me towards and for which I am grateful.

Where the Herbaria Are: Botanical Gardens

Staircase in the first building of the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

All herbaria are basically the same.  They all have cabinets filled with folders, each with specimens attached to thick sheets of white paper that are almost the same size.  They may have other types of collections, but the sense you get when you enter an herbarium is usually of ranks of cabinets.  However, on my visits to herbaria I have also been struck by how different they can be:  in size, in collection strategies, in ancillary collections, and in their position within larger institutions.  So in this series of posts, I’m going to explore some of the cultural differences among plant collections that are dependent on their institutional environments.  I’ll begin with what is one of the largest categories, those affiliated with botanic gardens.

It’s probably more than coincidence that the first botanic garden, founded in 1543 in Pisa, was begun by the Italian botanist Luca Ghini who is also believed to be the originator of the herbarium somewhat earlier.  Both were used to support Ghini’s teaching of materia medica at the Pisan medical school.  He would take students out to the garden after class, pointing out the plants he had just described in lecture; sometimes he would show them the pressed specimen as well, so they could appreciate how drying changed a plant’s appearance.  The herbarium also served as a teaching aid during the winter months.  Around the time this garden was founded, Leonhart Fuchs (1542) published one of the first printed herbals with accurate plant illustrations, to supplement the information available in gardens and herbaria.  These three innovations were essential to the development of early modern botany, and it’s not surprising that they are still often found together today.

Great botanical gardens usually have great herbaria and great libraries.  This is true of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, and many others.  From the very beginning, specimens have been supported by text; an unlabeled specimen is virtually useless.  But as botany developed, sources such as Fuchs were cited as ways to link name and plant description.  Books became vital references, and needed to be close at hand.  The fact that the Pisa garden was attached to a university is also important.  This was an institution where knowledge was passed on and generated, with specimens playing a role in both endeavors.  In my next post, I’ll discuss the relationship between herbaria and education, but for now, I’ll continue with the botanic garden thread.

Many of the major botanic gardens are so large that their functions are segregated into different departments, with a library director and a herbarium director being separate functions, though there is close collaboration especially because they are often housed in the same or adjacent buildings.  This is true in New York, Missouri, Kew, and Melbourne.  It is a wonderful luxury to be able to go just a few steps to check a reference or to find an illustration, either in a book or in botanical art collection also housed in these libraries.  The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Kew have huge collections of illustrations done by native Indian artists under the direction of botanists and physicians working for the East India Company.  Such art was considered so important to systematics that these sheets were stored with the specimens.  This situation is changing, and the art has been moved to the libraries, cross-referenced with the plant name and that of the artist.

But in botanical gardens, it’s the relationship between the living and preserved collections that seems to me to be most important, and in some cases closely tied to national identity.  I felt this most keenly in Australia, where digitization of the national herbarium collections was first focused on Australian plants, where efforts to prevent the spread of invasive species are particularly rigorous, and where botanical artists often focus on native plants.  Celia Rosser did magnificent watercolors of all the species of the quintessentially Australian genus, Banksia; vouchers made from the specimens she used are housed in several of the country’s national herbaria.  There is also a sense of local pride when a garden manages to bring a particularly fussy plant into flower.  Right now, corpse flowers (Amorphophallus titanum) seem to be all the rage because of their size and the awful odor the bloom exudes.  Making specimens is difficult because of the flower’s size and bulk.  Daniel Atha at NYBG did such a good job that the multiple sheets he created were used in an exhibit on the herbarium.  More importantly, NYBG keeps a significant collection of specimens recording the cultivated plants growing in the garden, not just the celebrities.

Unfortunately, I am going to end on a sour note.  NYBG’s sister garden, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, was also linked to a magnificent library and herbarium, all three founded at the beginning of the 20th century.  However, in  2013 the garden’s director summarily closed the herbarium and downsized the library’s footprint at the same time.  The collection’s 300,000 specimens are now on “temporary” loan to NYBG, the library is still trying to wrestle with its lack of space, and the active environmental community in Brooklyn is left without an important resource.  The links that were forged in the 16th century by Ghini and his fellow botanists have been severed.  The only consolation is that these connections remain strong at many other institutions.

Note:  I would like to thank all the people at the institutions I’ve visited for sharing their expertise with me.

Showing Off Botanical Illustrations

The husband and wife team of historians of science, Helen and William Bynum, recently published Remarkable Plants That Shape Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2014).  It is based on their broad knowledge of the history of how plants have been used, particularly as medicines, and also on their thorough knowledge of the collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  All of the illustrations are drawn from Kew collections–from its herbarium, economic botany collection, library, and botanical art.  The text is quite interesting.  The Bynums pack quite a bit into the plant descriptions that run to about a page in length.  They cover the history of the plant’s use as food, medicine, etc. and provide other intriguing botanical information as well.  However, the illustrations are definitely what make the book so noteworthy.  Besides drawing from such well-know works at those of Fuchs and Redouté, they also include unpublished original paintings, many by indigenous artists, particularly for illustrating Indian plants, since several 19th-century botanists hired native artists to help them to document the rich flora of the subcontinent.  There are also a number of herbarium specimens pictured, something not often seen in such richly illustrated books that usually focus on botanical prints and watercolors.  Finally, there are items from the economic botany collection, which itself has a rich history, being founded by William Hooker and developed by Joseph Dalton Hooker in the 19th century, the heyday of such collections.  It is the combination of these different kinds of images that makes this book particularly alluring.

There have been two other books published recently that show off the botanical collections of noteworthy institutions.  One is Flora Illustrated (Yale, 2014) edited by Susan Fraser and Vanessa Sellers of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG).  They and the other contributors cover a wide range of topics, from the illustrations of early modern botany to seed catalogues of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  However, there is nothing from the garden’s massive herbarium and few illustrations that aren’t from published sources.  There are some notebooks highlighted, those of the botanists John Torrey and William Whitman Bailey, as a reminder of the libraries’ archival treasures.  But essentially, this is a book about books.

A different approach to a vast collection is Flora: An Artistic Voyage Through the World of Plants (2014) by Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum, London, which published this book.  This has a wonderful text with fascinating illustrations but here most are from the Museums’ vast collection of art.  Knapp takes the interesting tack of focusing on particular genera or families and providing a dozen or so images of each along with a commentary about the plants’ structure, physiology, habitat, and cultivation.  One annoying feature of the book’s organization is that the descriptions of the illustrations, which are very useful, are gathered at the end of the chapter, given along side a thumbnail of each illustration.  This makes for much paging back and forth within a chapter.  As in the NYBG book, the herbarium is almost ignored here.  However, I must add that Knapp is author of another book, also called Flora (Schirmer/Mosel, 1997) with spectacular photos of specimens done by Nick Knight.  There too Knapp provides commentaries on the plants, but they are less lengthy than those in her new book.  The photos are definitely works of art, rather than herbarium documents, since the backgrounds are cleaned up and sheet labels and notations have been erased.