From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.
By Sylvia Orli
For several years, the Department of Botany’s Information Technology team has been reviewing transcriptions of specimen labels returned from the digitization company Picturae and fixing the records that are incorrectly transcribed. Many specimen labels have terrible handwriting. One kind of label consistently puzzled the team. The label is slightly pinkish with a legible taxonomic name, but every other word is written in an unreadable script. Because the team could not read these labels, we imported these records on to the online catalog as “illegible” with the hopes of one day correcting the record.
I posted examples of these labels in the Facebook page “Herbarium Junkies” with the hopes that crowdsourcing might solve the problem. Herbarium Junkies was created in 2012 by Museum Specialist Erika Gardner when she was in graduate school. She made the page as a bit of a joke, dedicated to herbarium devotees like herself, to post funny and interesting items about herbaria. The Facebook group has since ballooned to over 2,000 members, and has a global membership of botanists, herbaria workers, and plant enthusiasts. Group members post confusing labels, interesting herbarium specimens, images of field work, and all sorts of topics related to herbaria.
My illegible label post caught the eye of Clemens Pachschwoll, doctoral student at the University of Vienna, who verified that the label was written in the Kurrentschrift script, a Germanic cursive script popular in pre-WW2 Germany. He also verified that the collector was Friedrich Vierhapper Sr. Vierhapper (1844-1903) and his son, Friedrich Karl Max Vierhapper (1876-1932), were prominent Austrian botanists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Vierhappers specialized in the Flora of Austria and other European countries. Vierhapper Jr. has the genus, Vierhapperia, named after him. Clemens put me in touch with Michael Hohla of Austria, who specializes in the Flora of the Innviertel (the western part of Upper Austria). Amazingly, he and his colleagues had published a monograph of the Vierhappers, “Father and son Vierhapper – two lives dedicated to Botany” in 2019 (Stapfia 110: 1-202), and Hohla was delighted to see these inscrutable labels.
A specimen of Luzula silvatica Gandich collected in Austria, May 1887, by F. Vierhapper. Prof. Michael Hohla transcribed this location as “Wälder am Hausruck bei Eberschwang”.
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