The Massey Herbarium Welcomes 200-Year-Old Plants Back to America

So as an herbarium, we have this big collection of plant museum specimens, plants that have been preserved and added to our collection for research or education. We work with a lot of other museums and universities around the world. And one of them, the Natural History Museum in London, contacted me and said that they had found this set of specimens in their backlog from the 1840s. And these were all things that have been collected in the Southeastern US. And they had multiple copies of the specimens. So they were wondering if we wanted a set of them. It's very unusual for us to get material that old. Our oldest sheet goes back to 1829, and then we have very little until about the 1890s, so we were really excited to get this set of specimens. So it showed up a little bit before Christmas break and we got a little over 50 specimens from the 1840s. So they were collected by a German botanist, his name was Ferdinand Rugel. He started life as a pharmacist and then started dabbling in botanical collecting. Back then, it was really common to collect samples of plants or animals and sell them other collectors or museums. He was dabbling with this in Europe and then in 1840, he took a trip to the US. He hit a bunch of different places in the Southeastern US. He was in Virginia, North Carolina, down to Georgia and Florida, over the course of a couple of years, collected a lot of specimens in these areas and sent them back to Europe to be sold. He wound up settling in Tennessee. He fell in love with an American woman and married her and raised 12 children. He went back to work as a pharmacist, but he kept dabbling in botany. And he would do occasional trips in the Southeast or down to Cuba or out to Texas where he would collect more samples and sell them as a sideline or side gig for his pharmacy job. We use specimens here for a lot of different things. We can use them for teaching people, plant ID specimens this old, we won't use so much for that purpose. We'll use them more for research or documentation. This lets us look back into the past and see what was happening in Virginia or other areas in the Southeastern US almost 200 years ago. We can compare changes over time. We could go to the same sites and see if the plants themselves have changed their physical characteristics in response to environmental factors. We can look to see if different plants are found there. Now, maybe some plants have gone extinct in that area, are found farther north. Now we can look at environmental changes that way you can actually look at chemicals and microscopic characters and track genetic change. Other small changes like that over time, you can look carefully and you can actually see when certain plant diseases first emerged or became common by finding evidence of them in these old specimens. So we'll put them to use in a lot of different ways and they'll definitely be a valuable part of our collection.