From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.
By Julia Beros
In 2017, botany contractor Victor Shields was tasked with reorganizing the clutter of the Euphorbia cases, and among the sheets of pressed material he found one nearly empty with a small photograph pasted in the upper corner. And soon he found another. And then another, and another. Often in the collections various sheets void of plant material are stored with herbarium specimens, dubbed “literature” they are usually write-ups and keys to species and synonyms or cut-outs from articles with relevant information. The photographs Shields found, though sparse with information, were part of a more intricate history of succulent research.
At the turn of the 20th century J.N. Rose (noted motorcycle-riding botanist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution) along with N.L. Britton (co-founder of the New York Botanical Garden) were the major authorities on Cactaceae, collaborating as well in work on Crassulaceae. Abroad in Germany, Alwin Berger was a prominent figure in succulent botanical research, having worked in gardens throughout Europe he developed an interest in succulents, ultimately publishing multiple monographs and aiding in the nomenclature and evolutionary study of cacti and agaves. Rose and Britton even named a genus Bergerocactus in his honor. He was greatly supported by his fellow succulent enthusiasts, namely Harry Franck, a highly active member of the German Cactus Society. At the time Franck, a hobbyist in Frankfurt, had cultivated one of Europe’s largest living collections of succulents.
His massive collections served the botanical community by providing live specimens, rare even in cultivation, for research. Though he died just before Berger’s publication of Die Sukkulente Euphorbien in 1907, his passion and contributions live on through the photographs of his cultivated specimens gathered by his son Harry Franck, making the illustrations possible for this monograph. Haunting portraits, these statuesque creatures emerging from terra cotta with their names etched onto tags dangling at the nape of their pots, serve as historical research documents, and ethereal momentary impressions of the still steady work of a succulent: arms cutting into the sky as roots do below the surface, hoarding water through CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism).
Photographs of cultived Euphorbia cereiformis, Euphorbia cooperi, and Euphorbia grandidens appear on herbarium sheets in specimen folders.
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