Hello, loyal readers, and welcome to part two of our three-part article series on the Mütter Herbarium, a new project for the . If you missed part one, wherein guest writer Ella Serpell explained the history of herbaria, you can . These articles coincide with the anniversary of the death of Swedish botanist .
of this series on herbaria, the Mütter Museum plans to start the Mütter Herbarium preserving the plants in the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Garden and recording them on herbarium sheets. While Part 1 reflected on what is included in many herbaria and what will be included in ours, Part 2 will focus on summarizing some of the historical origins and uses for herbaria, as well as their future.
People have tried to dry or preserve flowers and plant materials for much of history. However, the start of herbarium-like pressing of flowers for scientific study seems to have started in the 16th century. Luca Ghini (1490-1556), an Italian botany professor is credited as being the first person to preserve plants by drying them under pressure. This practice became common among European scientists studying plants. In the 18th century Carl Linneaus (1707-1778) was a practitioner of this method and collected pressed specimens in this way. Frustrated with cataloging and organizing these specimens, he set out to standardize the practice. He standardized the system of mounting each specimen on one large, uniformly-sized paper and by storing them in cabinets that could hold additional materials. Many of the standards he set for storing these sheets are still used by most modern herbaria today. However he did not stop there. He also wanted a standard system for organizing the specimens in the cabinets, and this is what inspired him to create the "Linnaean system" of naming that earned him the title “the Father of Modern Taxonomy”.
Knowing the role herbarium sheets played in the creation of this system, it is interesting to reflect on what attributes were used in early taxonomy to distinguish and categorize species. Many taxonomic classifications are based mostly on morphological attributes, like the number of petals on a flower or the shape of a fish’s fin, especially in historical times. These are the types of attributes that would be preserved well in plants on a herbarium sheet.
Also in the 16th century, roughly the same time Luca Ghini was preserving plant matter for the study of botany, the Japanese art of oshibana, arranging dried pressed flowers into art, was being developed. When European trade with Japan expanded, many people in Victorian England were already interested in flowers for artistic decoration and turning pressed flowers into artistic pieces became very popular. This artistic interest in pressing flowers may have helped to fuel the popularity of amateur plant collecting in botany as well as advances in the technique and technology used for plant pressing.
For both casual flower pressings for beauty and academic herbarium specimens, part of the appeal was their ease of transport. Sending a friend or a fellow academic a pressed plant helped establish and maintain social networks. Distinctions between a casual pressing and scientific collection became increasingly important to botanists working with plants academically. This process of distinguishing "amateur" botanists from professional academic botanists was often used to exclude and minimize the contributions of certain participants in botany, such as Victorian women, who were some of the most avid collectors. Despite this, botany remained one of the most accessible fields for "amateurs," especially if they lived in an unusual location. By including these ‘amateur’ individuals into the social network of botanists, botanists living in Europe could get sent specimens from all over the world. However, they rarely received much credit for any discoveries made using their specimens.
In a similar way, many botanists and scientists living in Philadelphia maintained relationships with respected scientists in Europe. At the time of the founding of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, medicinal plants were an integral part of the medical profession, much more than in modern medicine, and many of the early physicians who were Fellows at The College were also trained in botany and were part of these international networks. It is worth remembering that in 1787, the year the college was founded, the founders were residents of a country that had been independent for only 4 years. So many of these relationships had begun within the framework of an English colony and English botanists exchanging information about two parts of one Empire. Because of the English desire to understand the flora of their colonies, there was increased interest in receiving novel American plant specimens. In exchange, American botanists received European plant specimens, and/or the latest news and theories being discussed in European Universities.
Though herbaria were particularly important during the colonial era, it is important to remember that they are not only historical artifacts or obsolete tools. Herbaria are still kept by many universities and institutions for botanical research. They can still be used in a similar way as they were historically, but the digital age has allowed for some larger scale examinations which would never have been possible in colonial times. Instead of looking at one sheet and specimen at a time, or several sheets at one herbarium, scientists can look at thousands of accessible digitized collections from around the country and the world, all from their offices. This can allow them to study population level information, such as analyzing geographical distribution of species using the collection locations of many sheets or comparative flowering times by using the date of collection of specimens that were flowering at the time. Some projects have even used crowdsourcing and citizen science initiatives to help scientists analyze large numbers of sheets. This can allow for robust population level statistical analysis that would be difficult for one person to achieve. In addition, there is modern research that can be done on the DNA or other elements of the chemical composition of the plant material contained in the herbarium sheet. Techniques like this keep herbaria a relevant part of modern botanical research today.
Now that you know a little more about the history and modern usage, You might want to try your hand at making your own herbarium sheet. Next week we will post Part 3 of this series, a quick summary of the steps to do it yourself, as well as links to more herbarium resources.
Sources:
Ayers, Elaine. “Quarantine Herbarium: A Record of Nature from Home, Produced during COVID-19,” March 2020. .
Ayers, Elaine. “Marking Time in Nature: The Quarantine Herbarium in Historical Perspective,” Online presentation for the Wagner Free Institute, July 8th 2020.
Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible empire: Botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Endersby, Jim. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Harshberger, John. The Botanists of Philadelphia and Their Work. Philadelphia: TC Davis and sons, 1899.
Sbrosious. “Pressed Flowers: History and Tutorial.” Pressed Flowers History and Tutorial. Western Reserve Historical Society, April 22, 2020. https://www.wrhs.org/blog/pressed-flowers-history-and-tutorial/.
Spellman, Katie V., and Christa P. H. Mulder. “Validating Herbarium-Based Phenology Models Using Citizen-Science Data.” BioScience66, no. 10 (2016): 897–906. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw116.
Verlinde, Sarah. “History and Modern Uses of a Herbarium.” UW Bothell Herbarium, October 2016. https://www.uwb.edu/getattachment/wetlands/herbarium/herbarium-history-and-modern-uses/History-of-Herbaria-Infosheet.pdf.