Herbarium: The Quest to Preserve and Classify the World’s Plants

Thiers, director of the New York Botanical Garden’s herbarium, delivers a fascinating and beautiful resource for gardeners about her field—the study of plants via dried and preserved specimens. She begins by highlighting the pioneering Luca Ghini (b.1490), an Italian physician and professor who first advanced the study of plants’ medicinal qualities from “a minor subdiscipline of medicine into an independent scientific endeavor.” Ghini is credited for creating the first herbarium—a book filled with pressed specimens of plants, glued onto the pages alongside annotations about a particular plant’s features, the circumstances behind its collection, its known medical properties, and other facts. “If handled carefully and kept protected from moisture, insects, and light,” the author notes, “a dried plant specimen could be preserved in this manner indefinitely.” Thiers tracks the discipline as it evolved, spurred by Renaissance scientific curiosity and more recently by technological advances, such as genetic sequencing tools that allow scientists to research extinct species using herbaria specimens. Today, she writes, there are some 390 million specimens held in 3,300 herbaria around the world, giving scientists a greater understanding of plant life generally, as well as a deeper understanding of how forces like climate change are affecting the environment. Green-thumbed readers will find this to be a stimulating intellectual adventure. (Nov.)