The Herbarium and Library, Connected

Eric Roalson, WSU School of Biological Sciences professor and director of the WSU Marion Ownbey Herbarium.

Eric Roalson, professor in the WSU School of Biological Sciences and director of the WSU Marion Ownbey Herbarium, researches plant systematics and runs the Roalson Lab, which studies the patterns and processes of diversification primarily in plant lineages, with emphasis on Cyperaceae, Cleomaceae, and Gesneriaceae. Since becoming Ownbey Herbarium director in 2020, Roalson has overseen several initiatives, including the incorporation of the WSU Tri-Cities/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory herbarium, Ownbey Herbarium’s move to Owen Science and Engineering Library, and collections manager Walter Fertig’s hire in 2022. To learn more about Roalson, see his SBS profile.

Lycopodium clavatum (common clubmoss or elk-moss) specimen found in Grays Harbor County, Washington, Pacific Coast Range, South Olympic Mountain Range, 4 miles north of Lake Wynochee, collected by Walter Fertig, Regina Johnson, Steve Ness, and Mary McCallum in 2020. Photo courtesy of WSU Marion Ownbey Herbarium.

An herbarium is a natural history museum for plants and fungi, and these natural history collections have a historical connection to libraries. This is true, generally, for natural history museums more broadly, and some of the most extensive libraries of natural history-focused books are co-located with the museum collections themselves, such as the library collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden, the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in England, and the libraries at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. One of my earliest experiences as a botany doctoral student was working in the library at the California Botanic Garden, which houses the botany doctoral program for Claremont Graduate University.

Polemonium viscosum (sky pilot or sticky polemonium) specimen found in Grand County, Colorado, in an alpine basin on the eastern slope of Parkview Mountain, collected by Larry Hufford and M. Snyder in 1996. Photo courtesy of WSU Marion Ownbey Herbarium.

So why are herbaria connected to libraries? Natural connections between libraries and herbaria have existed for hundreds of years for several reasons, but most notably, systematics (the study of organismal diversity) is to a significant degree a historical science. The foundation for how we classify organisms is in the literature of how they were originally named and described. We need continual access to original published works from the last 300+ years as a basic component of our research.

Additionally, library collections associated with herbaria are important, as those published works on plant diversity of geographical areas (“floras”) and specific plant groups (“monographs”) are what we use to identify the plant collections that are the core of the herbarium.

Peteria thompsoniae (spine-noded milkvetch or Thompson’s peteria) specimen found in Kane County, Utah, Colorado Plateau, Vermilion Cliffs, collected by Walter Fertig in 2008. Photo courtesy of WSU Marion Ownbey Herbarium.

In many ways, herbarium specimens are analogous to pages in a book. Each sheet has the dried plant itself, and the specimen label tells the story of where the plant was found, who collected it, and the various names it has gone by over time. Specimens are organized into folders of species and further grouped in cabinets based on their classification. The herbarium is, in effect, a library of the natural world!

Interestingly, early in its history, the term “herbarium” was applied to bound sets of specimens that were kept in libraries. These books typically represented the plants of a particular place or those collected by a particular person, and the Ownbey Herbarium has some examples of these herbarium books on display.

The Ownbey Herbarium was established at WSU in the 1890s, and since that time, it has held a library of works pertinent to the plant collection. Harold St. John, the herbarium’s director in the 1920s, greatly expanded the library collection to provide more extensive reference sources.

In 2022, when plans to demolish Heald Hall (the longtime location of the herbarium) became final, moving the herbarium to a library building became an opportunity to deepen the connection between the herbarium and WSU Libraries. Now the herbarium’s 413,000 plant specimens and 1,000+ books are near the more extensive holdings of books and journals on natural history and plant diversity found in the Owen Science and Engineering Library.