Life in Slot Canyons
Cabinet of CuriositiesExpeditions
Slot canyons are deep channels eroded into rock. They are often ten…
Oro City – A Colorado Ghost Town
Oro City was a gold placer (stream-bed) mining town in Colorado, founded…
Eight Days of Oil
Oil has a special significance for those who celebrate Hanukkah. This Jewish…
Elizabeth Britton and the Curly-Grass Fern
Specimen StoriesWomen in Science
Tucked away in an office drawer of NYBG’s Fern Curator, Robbin Moran,…
Hidden Women Botanists - Mrs. Herbert Huntington Smith
The NYBG herbarium has over two thousand specimens that are labeled as collected…
Kate Furbish and the Flora of Maine
Catherine Furbish was born in 1834 in Exeter, New Hampshire. From an…
Lichenicolous Fungi
Composed of different species each playing a different role, a lichen can…
Ellen Hutchins - Ireland's First Female Botanist
Between 1805 and 1813, in Ballylickey on the shores of Bantry Bay,…
Kauai Digit Fern
The Kauai Digit Fern, or Doryopteris angelica, is a rare fern found in the forest on…
Resurrecting from the Dead
I remember coming across Selaginella lepidophylla while imaging herbarium specimens for the…
The Many Colors of the Star Cloak Fern
While imaging herbarium specimens, I was struck by the unusual colors of…
The Atomic Specimen
Working with specimens from New Mexico for the Southern Rocky Mountain Digitization…
Heard it through the grapevine
Vitis is the genus of one of the world’s favorite horticultural crop:…
Catnip: A Felicitous Herb
Focus on ScienceWhat's in a name?
Calling all cat lovers! As I was digitizing plants for the Southern…
Beware! Stranglers on the Loose!
Focus on ScienceCabinet of Curiosities
Meet the genus Cuscuta, or as I like to refer to them,…
Celebrating Pride with Flowers
As the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots during…
Virtual Road Trip: Southern Wildflowers
Many Americans are currently practicing social distancing and self-quarantine as a way…
Sister Mary Clare Metz: Faith and Flora
While digitizing specimens for the Texas and Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria,…
The Biltmore Herbarium: Botany and America’s Largest Home
Biltmore, a Gilded Era mansion in Asheville, North Carolina, is America’s largest…
Fire Island: Preserving a Unique Ecological & Cultural…
On a geological time scale, barrier islands are by definition impermanent, ever-changing,…
Learning from Extinct Plants
Specimen StoriesFocus on Science
From the woolly mammoth to the passenger pigeon, many extinct species owe…
Ascension Island: Volcanoes, Castaways, and Darwin’s Manmade Forest
One million years ago, a volcano broke the surface in the middle…
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience seeks to acknowledge the complex…