Yesterday we had thirteen VT students from the Natural History Collections Club attend a work night at the Massey Herbarium! The students helped with mounting specimens from our backlog and preparing material for mini-specimens for an outreach event. After pizza of course! Students prepared hundreds of samples for mini-specimens! These will be used in a …
The Massey Herbarium hosted its first herbarium tea last Friday! Over 50 people from several departments attended and enjoyed tea, coffee, cake, and a plant pressing demonstration. Attendees were given a tour of the collection and a chance to see some of our more unusual specimens, including a sample from 1829. Curator Jordan Metzgar gave …
Read more “Plant pressing, hot tea, and good times at the first herbarium tea!”
The Massey Herbarium was proud to host the first meeting of the student-led VT Natural History Collections Club last night. 15 students and two curators attended the meeting, led by president Erin Quesenberry. The students discussed natural history collections and their interest in helping collections. They then toured the herbarium and particularly enjoyed seeing our …
Read more “First meeting of the Natural History Collections Club!”
The Massey Herbarium is referred to as a regional herbarium. Our size (115,000 specimens) means that our collections are centered on Virginia and the southeastern USA. Larger herbaria (millions of specimens) can have global representation in their collections. This doesn’t mean the Massey Herbarium doesn’t pull its weight globally! I looked at our specimen transfers over the …
Today I visited the Teaching Plant Collection in the Biological Sciences Greenhouse. It was wonderful being surrounded by fruiting papaya trees, towering Amorphophallus leaves, millions of maidenhair ferns, and other wonders! One of my favorites was this blooming cacao tree (Theobroma cacao). Yes, the chocolate tree! This species is cauliflorous, meaning the flowers sprout directly from the stem. …
Today I have been looking at illustrations in the Flora of Virginia and discovered that some of these illustrations were prepared using Massey Herbarium specimens. Lara Call Gastinger made this line drawing of American basswood (Tilia americana) using a loan of our material! If you have the Flora of Virginia, you can check out the Ilex collina, Juglans nigra, Juglans cinerea, and Sanicula smallii illustrations …
Natural history collections can last for hundreds of years but they need care and attention along the way. We recently installed a data logger to monitor the temperature, humidity, and light intensity in the herbarium. Humidity is an especially big threat to plant specimens. This graph shows the humidity (blue line), light intensity (green line), …
Last week Massey Herbarium staff ventured to the Jefferson National Forest in search of Montgomery County’s only population of Hartford fern (Lygodium palmatum). Curator Jordan Metzgar and retired curator Tom Wieboldt re-located this small population on a rainy afternoon. All plants at the site were sterile and the population seems to be decreasing in size since …
Including the reproductive parts of a plant is a crucial task in making herbarium specimens. These parts are often critical for identifying species correctly! This video shows the first step in pressing the spadix or flower stalk from Stinky Phil. Here I press a portion of the spadix with the actual flowers! Next: Assembling & …
I began by assembling my supplies and introduce the process and the herbarium in this video: Then I pressed the samples of Stinky Phil’s spathe, or the modified leaf surrounding the flower stalk. Next: Pressing Stinky Phil’s spadix