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The Language of Flowers genre is at the intersection of botany, horticulture, natural history, art, poetry, and women’s studies. This popular literary trend in the 19th century, presented the world of botany through dictionaries of flowers and associated meanings, floral poetry and prose, offering a sentimental view of natural history. A properly arranged bouquet was said to convey a “secret message” for the recipient. The “social media” of its day, this Victorian fad, led to many editions of works published, with multiple titles by successful authors.

Frances Sargent Osgood edited two works in this genre, Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of Poetry and The Floral Offering.

On 5 June 1834, avid amateur botanist Hardy Bryan Croom wrote a letter to botanist John Torrey describing a gymnosperm tree in northern Florida that he was struggling to identify. In this letter, he postulated—with some degree of confidence—that the tree was Taxus baccata, the common yew, and he hoped to acquire some specimens to send to Torrey for investigation.

Torrey was one of the most important 19th century botanists in America. He corresponded with hundreds of scientists in North America and Europe, many of whom sent him specimens from their various explorations for study and identification. As such a well-respected expert and advisor on botanical science, it comes as no surprise that Croom sought Torrey’s expertise regarding this mysterious Florida tree.

The next year, in a letter dated 18 November 1835, Croom wrote again to Torrey, stating:

“The letter which I wrote last summer has had the effect to procure me some perfect fruit of that remarkable Taxoid tree at Aspalaga. The result surprises me. It is an ovate one celled nut entirely enclosed in fleshy covering! as large as a pigeon’s egg! Calix imbricated; thus agreeing neither with Taxus nor with Podocarpus. Besides, the tree, I think, is dioecious, but of this I am not yet certain. What will you do with it? Will it make a new genus?”

The following year, Croom again wrote to Torrey in a letter dated 18 May 1836 that he had determined that the tree represented a new genus. He proposed the genus name Torreya and provided a description and habitat details for “this fine tree,” for which he remarked:

“It is so abundant about Aspalaga (especially on Flat Creek) as to have been sawed into plank and lumber. It is an elegant tree with dark green foliage.”

With this letter, Croom provided the first recorded description of the habitat and abundance of the Florida nutmeg, Torreya taxifolia.

Sadly, Croom and his family drowned in a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Hatteras on 8 October 1837. As such, Torrey arranged that the new genus and species were formally named and described by botanist George Arnott Walker-Arnott in 1838.

While Croom characterized Torreya taxifolia as abundant in 1836, today the species is critically endangered. With a distribution restricted to the limestone ravines and bluffs along the Apalachicola River in northern Florida and southern Georgia, fewer than a thousand individual trees persist in their native habitat. The most significant threat to the species is continued reproductive failure resulting from fungal pathogens—a threat which is continuing but not well-understood.

This year, as organizations around the world have done in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) held its annual conference virtually. With a mix of online working sessions, webinar-style symposia, presentations, panel discussions, and recorded presentations, this year’s conference was held across two separate periods—the first dedicated to working sessions during the week of 21-25 September 2020 and the second to symposia and panel sessions the week of 19-23 October 2020.

On 20 October 2020 as part of the TDWG 2020 virtual conference, BHL hosted a symposium, “SYM03 Enhancing Connections With the Global Neighbourhood Through Expanding Partnerships”, organized by Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard and Chair of the BHL Executive Committee) and Colleen Funkhouser (BHL Program Manager, Smithsonian Libraries).

The symposium consisted of four talks, covering topics including building BHL’s technical strategy, digital object identifiers (DOIs), taxonomic name finding services, and BHL’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

We often think of natural history libraries serving as memorials for lost species, animals like the passenger pigeon and the dodo living on only in books, photos, and illustrations that tell sad cautionary tales of once-abundant populations lost to overhunting or habitat destruction.

However, such records also tell stories of hope, providing valuable resources for modern scientists working to protect threatened wildlife. Since it was founded in 2006, BHL’s historical documents have supported the work of conservationists devoted to saving everything from Caribbean mammals to rare wetland plants. Not only are accessible records that describe the historic ranges, populations, and other characteristics of a species essential for researchers, but they help remind the public of how vibrant historical ecosystems were—and the importance of protecting what is left.

“The real advantage of BHL is keeping our ecological memory intact, and not allowing us to collectively forget how beautiful, wild, and diverse ecosystems of the past were,” wrote historical ecologist Dr. Joshua Drew in a blog post from BHL’s 2020 Earth Optimism campaign. “If we succumb to this collective amnesia, we risk setting our conservation bar too low and allowing the dulling of our natural environments to continue without even recognizing our losses.”

As part of BHL’s Earth Optimism series, we’re sharing the conservation success stories of four bird species, all prominently featured in the BHL collection, whose impending losses were reversed through the efforts of concerned citizens and researchers.

In 1780, French naturalist François Le Vaillant traveled to the Cape of Good Hope and subsequently spent several years studying the region’s biodiversity. During his three journeys—the first around Cape Town and Saldanha Bay (April to August 1781), the second eastwards from the Cape (December 1781 to May 1783), and the third to the Orange River and into Great Namaqualand (June 1783 to c. May 1784)—Le Vaillant amassed a collection of thousands of specimens. Upon returning to Europe, he published accounts of his travels within Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique (1790, 2 vols.) and Second voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique (1796, 3 vols.)—both of which were best sellers and were translated into several languages.

Within these narratives, Le Vaillant writes repeatedly of his Khoikhoi guide, whom he called Klaas (but whose name in Klaas’s own Khoe language seems to be unrecorded). Le Vaillant’s respect and affection for Klaas is evident. In the first volume of his Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, Le Vaillant writes:

“…le bon Klaas fut déclaré mon égal, mon frère, le confident de tous mes plaisirs, de mes disgrâces, de toutes mes pensées ; il a plus d’une fois calmé mes ennuis, & ranimé mon courage abattu.” [“…the good Klaas is declared my equal, my brother, the confidant of all my pleasures, of my disgraces, of all my thoughts; he has more than once calmed my troubles, & revived my shattered courage.”]

Klaas, of whom Le Vaillant wrote “by long practice [he] had become a naturalist”, also collected specimens for the French naturalist, which Le Vaillant later described within publications such as Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d’Afrique (1796–1808, 6 vols.). One such specimen was that of Klaas’s cuckoo, a species native to the wooded regions of sub-Saharan Africa. According to Le Vaillant, Klaas collected the specimen “près de la rivière Platte” (“near the Platte river”). It was the only individual of this species that the company encountered during their expedition.

Feathers have been used in fashion throughout history, but the trend became more widespread from the late 18^th century when the Industrial Revolution made luxuries more available to the masses. In the 19^th century, new technology improved the speed of production and the millinery industry boomed. Hats with feathers became a status symbol coveted by a new mass market and were produced on an industrial scale.

Birds were hunted around the world to supply plumes to centres of fashion such as London and New York. In 1886, American Museum of Natural History’s ornithologist, Frank Chapman, infamously observed on a walk in New York some 40 native bird species on women’s hats, some with an entire stuffed bird attached. Indeed, women were oft blamed for the trend: in The Ibis in 1887, women were pointed to as “the indirect, but real, instigators of this slaughter”. The author continues: “all that can be hoped for is that the freaks of feminine vanity may take some other and less harmful direction.”

The solitary sea squirt Ascidiella aspersa is native to the Northeastern Atlantic, from the Mediterranean Sea to Norway. Living in shallow sheltered sites and harbors, this species has a fast growth rate and is able to produce a large number of larvae.

These attributes have helped make it a successful colonizer of non-native environments, such as the Southwestern Atlantic, where it has become an invasive species introduced likely via ships.

Dr. Evangelina Schwindt, Head of the Grupo de Ecología en Ambientes Costeros from CONICET in Argentina, studies Ascidiella aspersa as part of her research as a marine invasive ecologist. Her work involves researching the interactions between invasive and native species, the patterns and processes occurring in biological invasions from the historical and present-day perspectives, the impact caused by invasive species, and the management strategies that can be applied.