This November, the University of Arkansas Herbarium is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Francis LeRoy Harvey founded the herbarium when he arrived at the U of A in 1875 and wore many hats in his decade in Fayetteville as a botanist, a zoologist, entomologist, geologist, chemist — and he did it all with a bachelor’s degree, which was common at the time.
“They were just very well educated and could do a lot of different things, and we have a picture of him here on our cabinet. We like to keep a picture of him out.”
That’s Jennifer Ogle, the collections manager for the herbarium.
This space probably looks substantially different from the one Harvey worked in 150 years ago. Today, it’s situated in a fairly nondescript university building, with the University of Arkansas Press on the other end of that building. It’s likely that you could walk into the herbarium and not even realize that it holds nearly 140,000 plants.
Maribeth Latvis is the director of the herbarium. She says the thing to note about the space is that the plants inside here are not living.
“So when you walk in, what you’re seeing is a series of metal cabinets. But inside these cabinets, you have preserved plant material that’s been curated and organized, and these records go back hundreds of years.”
Ogle pulls out one of those records that goes back to the original founder’s collection.
“But you can see this was collected in Massachusetts by him in 1877, two years after he arrived here. So he traveled widely around the U.S. and collected plants. But this was his habit. He had a spot on his typed label for habitat, and he would handwrite the habitat. It was very general on this Spiraea tomentosa specimen. It’s commonly known as hardhack. He wrote ‘low ground,’ and the locality — all he wrote was ‘Massachusetts.’ You’re never going to get back to it, right? You’re never going to find that population again.
“Turns out it doesn’t matter much for Massachusetts. This is a common plant in that region, common throughout the eastern U.S. But in Arkansas, if he had found it in Arkansas and written that ‘low ground, Arkansas,’ that would have been a big deal, because it’s a very rare plant in Arkansas. We want to get back to that population, and we can’t do that with his label data. We want to assess the size of the population, the health of it, the extent of it, of course, because it is rare here.”
Those inexact labeling habits led to some interesting quirks for modern-day scientists. Ogle says that in the late 1800s, professors at the university had free train passes to travel anywhere they wanted or needed for their research. That led to trips all across the U.S. for Harvey, with him and his plant press collecting and recording specimens.
“He found species new to science doing that in Arkansas. He’s had plants named after him for that. He also found a plant in southwest Arkansas, collected it, made a record much like this, very general information that we’ve never seen since in Arkansas. And so his specimen is the only record of that plant we have for the whole state. It’s the only evidence we have that that plant ever existed here.”
“How do you — when I hear that, I guess the journalist and skeptic in me says, how do you prove that he found it in Arkansas? Maybe he was lost, right? Because it’s common along the coastal region of the U.S. and the coastal plain.”
“This plant that he found is called redbay. A lot of people think he might have been lost. But botanists have searched and searched for that plant in the region of Arkansas where he said he was. We know he knew where he was. The trains knew where they were going, and he’d disembark and walk around. We didn’t think he lied. He had no reason to, really.
“And then more recently, botanists have found that plant a mile from the border of where we think he was, in both Texas and Louisiana, 140-some years later. So there’s some evidence that, yeah, he was probably there. He didn’t get all the way down to the coast on accident and just mislabel a specimen.”
She says that over the last 150 years, the herbarium collection has gotten more detail oriented.
“We have the ability to put a GPS point on things. And if you look at some specimens from 150 years ago, it might tell you the county, but that’s about it. And so what we’re having, we have more and more data now. We can do more with that data.”
“If you don’t mind, can we kind of walk through the aisles here and see what this looks like?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
When you walk in the door, seven-foot-tall cabinets with small paper labels on the outside are precisely in rows along the room. The herbarium cabinets have their own labeling and standards based on the taxonomic system — think class, order, family, genus, species.
Latvis says there is one cabinet that is not a part of that system.
“Oh, I think they might have moved. I was looking for the type specimens. Oh, they’re in the front. We have one cabinet, a couple of cabinets, that have what we call type specimens. And that’s when, if someone wants to describe a new species, that example gets called the type. It’s the reference specimen that everyone goes back to to know that it’s a member of that species. So type specimens are very prized in taxonomic research. They’re like the earliest reference for species that we have.”
Latvis says collecting samples from the region is a priority, but it’s not exclusively a collection from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, and it’s also not exclusive to native plants. She says they also catalog invasive species too.
“One of the projects that we have in my lab is the Consortium for Plant Invasion Genomics. And so herbarium collections play an important role in trying to track, like, the appearance of invasive species — when they first get here, when they start spreading. Can we look at their range expansion through time and that kind of thing?
“Another thing that we can do with these specimens is we have the capability to get DNA from leaf material. And some of these leaves are, you know, 100 years old, 150 years old. But we have the capability to get DNA, kind of like Jurassic Park style, and try to understand, like, what’s going on with the genetics of these invasive plants. Is there something genetically about them? Can we look at the signatures of invasion and spread and hybridization?”
Ogle says that not only is their collection expansive, but it’s also redundant.
“Redundancy is our bread and butter. We love redundancy, especially over long periods of time, so we might want the same thing over long, long time periods. But certain things we just don’t need more of.”
That means you can keep your dandelions for your own personal herbarium — no need for more of those in the university’s collection.
Latvis says recognizing 150 years of the University of Arkansas Herbarium is important. It’s a milestone.
“There’s a wealth of history in this room that we’re celebrating. But also, we’re looking to the future. So we have these collections. What can we do with it? How can we engage the public in novel ways?”
In celebration of the herbarium’s 150th anniversary, several events are occurring. On Thursday, Nov. 6, the Ozark Mountain Smokehouse will be the site of an anniversary dinner that will include a presentation from Theo Witsell, co-founder and chief conservation officer for the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. Friday, Nov. 7, will feature a research symposium on the university campus. And on Saturday, Nov. 8, the Fayetteville Public Library will be hosting an event to offer the public a chance to talk to a local botanist and press your own plant specimens.
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