The Plant Press

A DC teenager’s 1917-1919 herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

By Erika Gardner

Helen Barron was 13 years old in 1917 when she started pressing and preserving plants creating her personal herbarium. As the Spanish Flu was sweeping through her hometown of Washington, D.C., Barron found solace in Rock Creek Park and surrounding areas of the district by collecting plant specimens. Barron continued collecting plants in the Washington, D.C. region until 1919. Nearly a century later, in 2013, Mary Clagett Horm, Barron’s daughter, donated Barron’s two herbarium books, Spring Flowers 1917-1918 and Spring Flowers 1919, to the US National Herbarium. Upon accepting these collections, we were unaware of their historical significance. Little did we know, in about seven years, all of our lives would be put on hold and we too would be living during a global pandemic.

Helen Barron’s herbarium book, Spring Flowers-1919. A hand drawn dogwood graces the cover. (photo by Sue Lutz)

These books were placed on a shelf in the specimen preparation room along with other pressed plant books. Very seldom would we handle these books unless we were showcasing them for a tour. Sitting in my home office, I could not help but think about which specimens in the US herbarium were made during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. In an instant, the images of Barron’s books came to mind. I could see the hand drawn dogwood on the periwinkle-colored cover and the date 1919 written in black ink. I asked Sue Lutz, the Collection Manager, to gain access to these books and take a few photos to share. The plants are beautifully pressed and presented on each page. It is extraordinary to imagine a teenager collecting and pressing these specimens during a time when her world was also turned up-side down.

By the numbers: Pandemic edition

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

The staff of the Department of Botany is making a strong push to make the U.S. National Herbarium’s collection of over 5 million specimens available online. The Botany Specimen Catalog is available at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2. During the current pandemic with staff sequestered in their homes, work continues to accomplish the goals of a fully accessible catalog of specimens. Notable numbers and figures include:

13

The number of collections and information technology staff and contractors from the Botany Department dedicated to cleaning up catalog records.

___________

560,000

The number of EMu specimen records corrected and amended during the first three months of the pandemic
___________

260,000

The number of new specimen images added to museum’s database since March 2020.

___________

4,000

The approximate daily average number of public queries to the Botany Specimen Catalog during the spring months of 2020.

___________

https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2

That time when we all stayed home: The critical need for herbaria and continued plant collecting

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

By Julia Beros

Herbaria are not static institutions. They are not dust boxes growing stale or overgrown libraries of dead plants. Yet there is a stigma that knowledge of local flora has reached its capacity, taxonomy is “old school”, and resources should not be allocated to grow herbarium collections. “A collection” implies perhaps a finite assemblage of representatives of a flora, a catalogue of greatest hits, and a singularly definitive portrait of a biological moment in time. A biological collection though is more principally representative of change. Collections serve as a record of biodiversity with supreme detail that informs all other aspects of plant research: systematics and floristics, evolution and ecology, conservation and land management, and education. Though beyond this, collections record the activity of scientists and research institutions, and places this scientific effort into an historical context. It is likely that the current coronavirus pandemic will leave a great void in the biological records of herbaria as it alters the capability, resources, and focus of plant collecting as the pandemic continues to limit and alter the ways in which we may safely interact with our world. Currently, a piece of our landscape’s history is at risk of being erased, or more so never being recorded.

Through the collaborative work and careful planning of NMNH and the Department of Botany, botany contractors Victor Shields and Julia Beros have returned to the museum to turn the lights back on in the conveyor room. Picking up right where they left off, they continue to image the Poaceae. (photo by V. Shields)

It has been noted (for some time now) that plant collecting was already on the decline before the COVID-19 pandemic stalled many research trips. According to Prather et al. 2004 (Syst. Bot. 29:15-28), the general trend for plant collecting has been on decline since the 1960s (taken from a diversely sampled 71 herbaria). Discussed by Daru et al. 2017 (New Phytol. 217: 939-955), (and referencing many other discussions of the great decline in plant collecting) the ramifications of this trend are amplified by the widespread biases in herbarium collections. These biases include the influence of “mega-collectors” whose preferences shaped the content of collections beyond their own time at an institution. Other biases are temporal, geographic, and spatial, all limiting and skewing collections representation.

Presently the general focus for many institutions is largely in the Neotropics, as it is still understudied in comparison with many temperate floras, often shifting resources away from local floristic studies. With strong efforts being made to study and research the tropical flora, particularly in the Amazon, there is also a growing concern for repatriating and protecting the biological property of countries in these intensely studied regions (to mitigate the effects of scientific and economic exploitation as has been a recurring theme in history). However, there is continual evidence that temperate floras are not “complete” as new species are still being described, ecologies change rapidly with urban growth, destruction, and climate change (often altering plant distributions and population sizes), and species extinctions are not being fully documented.

There is another urgent danger: outlined in a letter to Congress from the American Alliance of Museums, it is estimated that nearly a third of museums are in jeopardy of permanently closing because of the conditions of the pandemic, and this includes herbaria. In addition, Funk and Morin 2000 (SIDA 18:35-52) note that herbaria in the southeastern U.S. are at a high risk of closing, making the floristic study of those regions an urgent endeavor. Despite facing the continued everyday challenges of low resources and staffing, and the urgent concern for the future of small herbaria, herbarium collections still provide incredible raw data for researchers and inform new scientific findings regularly. 

2020 has shaped an incredibly unique scenario marked by viral and societal factors whose clash are catalyzing great change. Similar periods in history show a pause in collecting at the U.S. National Herbarium. In 1918 during the flu pandemic, accessioned collections dropped nearly in half from the previous year. Despite the challenges during the 1918 pandemic, local teen botanical enthusiast, Helen Barron, collected, pressed, and mounted plants, creating a personal herbarium that reflects the flora of Washington D.C. during that time. Leaving behind a catalogue of books filled with tenderly pressed and methodically labeled specimens, Barron’s recreational botany has offered the unique perspective of plant collecting in a pandemic.

Helen Barron’s herbarium book, Spring Flowers 1917-1918. (photo by Sue Lutz)