From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2016.
By Laurence J. Dorr
When I interviewed for my position as Curator of Botany here at the NMNH the director asked me why I became a botanist. Fair enough. This is the standard sort of question one asks potential hires and I have resorted to similar queries when the tables were turned. I vaguely recall answering him in the way one does in these situations. I gave him the safe answer: I described how I roamed the woods outside Boston where I grew up, hunted for different plants and animals, and enjoyed learning their names and behaviors. Eventually and mercifully he cut me off and asked me something else. In retrospect, I now think that I should have given him the honest answer: I was seduced by an herbarium.
How did this happen? Serendipity was involved. I opted to pursue my undergraduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis. I was interested in English and comparative literature and Stanley Elkin, the novelist, was my first advisor. He was gruff, impatient, intimidating, and not all that helpful as a mentor, but I stayed the course. I read English and French literature and for no particular reason I fulfilled my science credits by taking geology classes. On a whim I enrolled in a spring wildflower class and in retrospect realize that it was then that I began to hear the siren song of Botany. Walter Lewis was the instructor and in addition to learning about his passion, spring beauties (Claytonia virginica) and their complicated cytology, I was introduced to floras, keys, taxonomy, systematics, and the concept of herbarium specimens and herbaria. There was something very attractive about botany and slowly I became torn between art and science. Presented with such a dilemma what does the typical undergraduate do? He (or she) takes time off to contemplate the conundrum. I was no different.
While I wrestled with what I wanted to do with my life, be a writer or be a botanist, I built myself a plant press and headed off to Alaska and the Yukon Territory to hike, camp, and collect plants. When I decided to re-enroll in school I returned to St. Louis with a modest collection of boreal and alpine plants and innocently brought them to the Missouri Botanical Garden, which I had never visited before, to ask how I might identify them. The herbarium had recently moved into the John S. Lehmann Building and when I first set foot in that space I was awed. One descended a half flight of stairs and came into a brand new pristine facility. The slate floors were spotless. The columns were glistening stainless steel. The millions of specimens were housed in massive red compactors and the compactor aisles opened with the press of a button. I had never seen anything like this. I was smitten and instantly seduced. But it was not just the facility and the collection that succeeded in seducing me. It was the graduate students who took the time to make me feel welcome, find me cabinet space, explain the nuances of collecting and identifying plants, introduce me to the curators, talk to me about their research, and invite me to the seminars that were frequently held in the Garden’s auditorium.
While I prefer to keep my personal life private I freely admit that my first herbarium love was the Missouri Botanical Garden. Other herbaria have turned my head since and I am fond of them all. Whether or not our relationships continued I have always tried to stay on good terms with each one. Each herbarium has allowed me to learn something new and enriched my life. When I began graduate school it was in Chapel Hill and I am embarrassed now to admit that after being shown its herbarium I innocently asked where the rest of the collection was stored. I thought every herbarium was the size of the one in St. Louis. At about the same time I became acquainted with the combined herbaria of Harvard University and every time I visited Boston, which was once or twice a year, I found my way to neighboring Cambridge. I began to learn the nuances of how large herbaria differed and how their taxonomic and geographic strengths reflected a combination of chance and design. As with Missouri, the openness of the staff and researchers talking passionately about their projects made the visits to Divinity Avenue exciting and intellectually stimulating.
Continuing graduate school in Austin I better came to appreciate the role and importance of large university herbaria and fell in love with the Plant Resources Center that holds the combined University of Texas and Lundell herbaria. Here again it was not the physical space or the specimens but the intellectual ferment that made the herbarium attractive. Not only were there professors and researchers, but also scores of fellow graduate students. And, more importantly, collecting and adding to the herbarium was encouraged. The mountains of northern Mexico were closer than those of west Texas and they were still yielding novelties so whenever we could we headed south. These trips allowed me to flirt briefly with the Geo. B. Hinton Herbarium, a private collection kept at the Rancho Aguililla in the hills of Nuevo León. This herbarium is unlike any other I have ever known. It is small but probably the most beautiful herbarium in the world. The work table is a large cottonwood tree split in half and balanced on brick feet. The specimens are stored around the margins of the room in hand-crafted metal boxes in arched brick alcoves covered in decorative tiles. Here Jaime Hinton, George Hinton’s son, married science and art.
After finishing graduate school, work took me back to St. Louis and my first love, but we grew distant and I spent little time in Missouri. I was off to more exotic localities and became acquainted with tropical herbaria in Madagascar and Africa. Among the many herbaria I came to know in these years only Tsimbazaza still holds a special place in my heart. Our relationship was relatively brief, but very complicated. In the three years that we were intimate our romance taught me a lot about botany, but looking back I now see that it taught me more about life. Work in Africa led to introductions to large herbaria in Europe and more relationships than I have space to detail. Later still I spent time in Latin America but there is not world enough and time to write about all those romances.
So, what is the moral of my tale? It is not that I have fallen in love with so many different herbaria, big and small, tropical and temperate, nor is it that these facilities are beautiful or plain, rich or poor, but that the true allure of herbaria and collections is the people studying and using them, and the ideas that they generate. Now that for better or worse I am married to the U.S. National Herbarium I want it to be as alluring as my first love. I hope we can continue to make our collection attractive and enticing, and I hope we can seduce new generations to fall passionately in love with systematic Botany.
The herbarium that seduced me was the L.H. Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University. Being in an herbarium, leafing through the specimens, you feel the collective passion and adventurous spirit of all those collectors, who each made a contribution to build that space of learning. Loved your post...
Posted by: Denise E. Costich | 02/13/2016 at 10:52 PM
Nature has its special way that makes one appreciate life. Botany gives as a clearer understanding to what is just the simple day today encounters of plants to the common man. Nice read
Posted by: Mart | 07/15/2016 at 05:00 AM
Call it passion,amazing
Posted by: Martin Buuri Kaburia | 09/30/2017 at 06:40 AM