All posts tagged with herbarium

“Towards the latter end of November, 1860, a proposal was made to organize a Botanical Society. There being no such Institution in operation in Canada, it was thought that much benefit might result from its establishment.”

So begins the first volume of the Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada, published in 1861 following the Society’s founding in Kingston, Ontario in 1860.

The Society—founded by members of the Queen’s College (now Queen’s University) natural history department—welcomed men and women as equal members and met regularly in Kingston. One hundred people attended the first meeting in January 1861, despite temperatures of –20 Celsius! The following month, 200 people were in attendance, including a young woman named Catharine (Kate) Crooks. She joined the Society on that occasion, along with her brother-in-law, Alexander Logie. Crooks and Logie had travelled from Hamilton, Ontario—southwest of Toronto—and presented the Society with a flora of Hamilton.

Visit any major botanical research institute today and you’ll find a herbarium, or collection of preserved plant specimens. These specimens are used to identify plants, to track where and when particular plants grow, and to help understand how plants are influenced by climate change and other environmental factors.

Formal herbaria have been around for about five hundred years. The first recorded herbarium was created by Italian physician and botanist Luca Ghini in the early 1500s. Called a Hortus Siccus, or “dry garden”, the herbarium was populated by drying plants under pressure between pieces of paper and then mounting the specimens for study. Today, herbaria are integral to botanical research.

Dr. Maura Flannery, Professor Emerita of Biology at St. John’s University in New York and a Research Associate in the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina – Columbia, studies the complex history of herbaria, their many uses, their digital future, and relationships between herbaria and botanical art. While she has been studying biology and its links to art over most of her career, Flannery’s interest in herbaria emerged about ten years ago.

The LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden is one of many partners on the Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project which was generously funded by the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR). As its contribution to the project, NYBG selected 91 field notebooks for digitization. Nine different collectors are represented in the selected volumes. The bulk of the selected volumes — a total of 61 — document the botanical collecting of Dr. Arthur Cronquist (1919-1992), a pre-eminent twentieth-century American botanist who spent most of his career at NYBG.