Another cryptic label

Here's another one that TPP hasn't figured out.  So see if you can help out with this one as well.  Another member of Apiaceae.  As you can see, another 150 yr old specimen and still in pretty good shape.  

Well aged specimens

You never know what you'll find when poking around in the deep, dark seldom-visited corners of an herbarium. So TPP keeps getting surprises. So you find a slim folder hidden away beneath a pile of unmounted specimens and out of curiosity you take the folder out for a look see.  The folder contained 5 specimens from the Lamiaceae, the mint family, 2 species of Lamium (deadnettles) and 3 species of Nepeta (cat mints).  OK, not too remarkable really. The specimens were collected in Greece in April '61, some 53 years ago. But the paper looks pretty old and clearly the specimens should be remounted, which fortunately can be done. The collector was Von Heldreich (Theodor), a German naturalist who lived from 1822 until 1902 making these specimens 153 years old actually. One wonders how long they had been at the bottom of that stack and why?  Although hand-written in European script, the labels are legible enough once you work out a letter or two. Who knows? The species names have been entered into the database. They are all new species to our collection, so species folder labels have been printed, and the specimens moved to a new pile, a pile awaiting some volunteer action to remount them on modern acid-free paper. Once this is done they'll be good for another 150 years.  This is one aspect of herbarium curation.

Water, fire, & insects

These are three primary worries of herbarium curators. The collection TPP curates is small, only 50,000 or so specimens.  Some of them date back 200 years, some were collected by famous people, and some are precious records of prior diversity. Basically our herbarium is a teaching facility. Still such collections are irreplaceable so their safety must be insured. Insects have not been a problem for us, and the sealed cases work well. However, the collection is on the first floor of a 4 story building and the infrastructure is crumbling particularly the plumbing. See where this is going? Leaks are quite common, and were even more common, and more noxious, when some chemists lived up stairs. When you turn on the tap in a sink in TPP's lab the water runs brown for quite awhile. Now some of the plumbing is due to be replaced, by necessity, so when maintenance people say there may be some unanticipated leaks while repairs are being made, us herbarium curators sit up and pay attention. Oh, and while fire is a long-shot problem, you have to make certain that water isn't used to put out a fire in the herbarium, and you hope no fire must be put out on the floors above. Water always finds its way down. So during the rest of this week TPP will be fitting some plastic sheeting over the rows of specimen cases to offer some protection should the worst happen. Ironically, while doing this the message arrives telling us that the building will be without water over the Thanksgiving break except maybe for leaks. TPP took some time to show the plumbers what the worry was, and interestingly enough, they were impressed by the age and condition of old specimens, and the size of the collection. The next day a big roll of plastic sheeting arrived.

A little behind on filing

Virtually all herbarium collections are behind on filing, unless they aren't collecting anything at all. This semester TPP has a class of warm bodies and the idea is to get them active and doing something useful. Like a lot of things, they best way to learn about herbarium curating is to do it.  So students start by mounting and filing specimens, and this is no problem in terms of finding them materials to work on because TPP is more than a little behind.  This is a massive problem inherited from a predecessor who sort of let things pile up, but TPP is less behind now than when he obtained control the whole collection.  So today TPP was checking accuracy of species names for a pile of old specimens that had been remounted to get rid of old deteriorating paper. So how far behind is TPP?  Well, let's see these specimens were collected from '45 to '67, but not 1945 to 1967, no, 1845 to 1867.  Now that's not too bad, just 150 to 170 years behind.  Actually this is a bit strange because mostly the backlog of specimens is from just 50-60 years ago, but for some reason these were set aside and ignored, for a long, long time.  Part of the problem is that many people cannot read the handwritten labels, but it's not impossible, so why these specimens were set aside so long ago remains a puzzle.  These were all exchange specimens, specimens that our institution obtained from Europe by trading with colleagues, so maybe they just weren't considered very important. Nonetheless the students are strangely impressed by the age of these specimens and the idea that they are working on something with a bit of history to it, that they are contributing to something that is expected to last for awhile barring some catastrophe like a water leak or a fire.

What makes a garden botanic? They don't know in Brooklyn.

What makes a garden botanic?  Obviously botany, a science, a process conducted by botanists, botanical scientists.  Without the botany all you got is a pretty garden, nice, but it adds nothing to the future.  This is rather similar to what makes a university a university?  Simple, it's the faculty and students engaging in scholarship, learning how to learn, and without this the institution is not a university. It saddens and outrages TPP mightily when a venerable institution decides it is no longer going to be in the business of science.  The Brooklyn Gardens (formerly Brooklyn Botanic Gardens) have decided to fire their science department, put their herbarium into storage, and cease being botanical.  It's still a pretty place, but now that's all it is.  Why they actually plan on tearing down the science building and putting up condos!  Gardens are only ever in two states: improving or declining, so without question the garden president Scot Medbury is presiding over its decline.  What you don't see in his bio is telling: botany.  He's a pretty place type guy; all show, no substance.  Why this rather reminds TPP of the black comedy A very peculiar practice where an American president, Jack Daniels, convinces Lowland University in the UK that it could operate very well without students.  This is becoming a bit of a worrisome trend because the type of science done at botanical gardens is becoming rare at universities, and former bastions of taxon based research, museums and botanical gardens, are now using fiscal arguments (of a dubious nature according to TPP's inside source at BBG) to get out of the business of science (e.g., the Field Museum, Fairchild Tropical Gardens).  Science in the USA is definitely in trouble; botany the more so.

Herbarium specimen filing problem

Here's a problem TPP has never had to deal with before.  Our herbarium contains an unfiled folder of historically important specimens collected a bit over 100 years ago by Mary Strong Clemens, a famous plant collector, from places like Yellowstone National Park, but to be accessible, they need to be in the collection.  The problem is that two to six different unrelated plants specimens are crowed onto 5" x 8"  small pieces of mounting paper (the collector was probably short on paper) and labeled by hand right on the paper right next to the specimen.  Now there are couple of possible solutions.  First, you might attempt paper doll "surgery" to separate the specimens mounting the pieces of the original sheet on a new piece of mounting paper, but even with a careful hand this may not be easy or possible on all of these sheets, and aesthetically, it's a terrible solution.  The solution that is leading the pack is to scan the specimens, like the above image, print it on archival paper and then file the "copies" in the right place for each specimen, but include a pointer on the photocopy "specimens" telling you where to find the "original", which will be filed correctly for one of the specimens.  This sounds like a good little project for the next student intern to come along.  Any other suggestions or solutions? 

Herbarium fun and games

An energetic and interested student has elected to learn about plant taxonomy and herbarium collections first hand by doing some specimen curation in our university herbarium collection.  Oh, the things you find; the things you learn.  It all starts innocently enough.  Give them a folder of old specimens, and old here means 150 year-old specimens, ones that were obtained from European botanists of the time in trade for North American specimens, a common enough practice.  Except for some reason these were never incorporated into the collection as a whole, and they’ve been just hanging around for a century and a half, and now the paper the specimens are mounted on is rapidly deteriorating, so the specimens, mostly still in good shape, need to be remounted on modern acid-free paper.  This part is easy enough.  But to add these specimens into the collection several things need to be done.  First you look to see if the species is already in the collection, and if so, then you add it to the correct species folder, filed in a genus folder alphabetically arranged within its family, which themselves are numerically arranged such that related families are placed close to each other, at least in the view of plant taxonomists of 100 years ago.  Hey, it’s just a filing system, so let’s not go crazy about a few odd placements, but some families have ceased to exist, and some families have been merged, and some have been fragmented.  Sometimes it's hard to decide how much should be updated.  OK, back to the problem at hand.  Now if you have to add a species to the list, you must make a label for a new species folder, and since those are printed on archival gummed labels, 20 to a page, you add the species name to a list until enough are accumulated.  Of course in 150 years, a lot can change, so you must check to see if this species still has this name or if now this name is a synonym of another species name.  Fortunately several databases exist for looking up plant names, e.g., here. 

Then you check this specimen against specimens already in the collection, or against some image files, to see if visually it looks like the plant was identified correctly in the first place.  So in this instance, the old specimen had an invalid name that is a synonym for Anemone numerosa, European wood anemone, which is most certainly a correct ID.  This species was in our species list, but that seemed a bit strange, so checking the three specimens already filed there, some more problems were encountered; they weren’t the same plant!  North American specimens, initially so named are now called Anemone quinquefolia, which also was in the species list.  So these N. American specimens were moved to the correct species folder and the old folder was now ready for the old European species.  But in the process one of the A. quinquefolia specimens from about 110 years ago was also obviously misidentified, but this was an easy one because it was Isopyrum biternatum, false rue anemone, except now this species is placed in the genus Enemion, which really messes with TPP’s memory banks, but you add a new genus label and a new species label to the list to relabel their folders.  So did you get all that?  Everything that was necessary to solve filing this one specimen!  Whew.  The very next old specimen is labeled Anemone sylvatica, and no such species exists or has ever existed.  Did the collector mean sylvestris instead of sylvatica?  This will take some more problem solving.  This is how it goes at times: mis-named, mis-filed, mis-identified, but this is how you learn. By solving the problems.  Now TPP only needs another 10 students with the same aptitude and interest.