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It is a Monday night and five members of the community are gathered around a table in the basement of Hannibal Hamlin Hall, looking through magnifying glasses at long, yellowed pieces of straw. After careful analysis, one of them pauses, looks up and makes a declaration in Latin.
It’s a meeting of Friends of the Herbarium – local volunteers working on a collection of preserved plants under the leadership of Chris Campbell, the herbarium’s director. The group is helping a visitor identify plants from their personal collections, using some of the herbarium’s specimens as a reference.
“It’s a chance to look at some species you really want to look at,” Campbell tells the group of volunteers, before they begin to cull and clean specimens from the collection. “If it takes you an hour to only get through 10, or 20, well, that’s OK.”
The foundation of the collection at the UMaine Herbarium began 150 years ago with a seed that took root in the soil around Orono. The resulting plant was hand-picked by the 16-year-old son of UMaine’s first president and mounted to a piece of paper. Today, it’s the oldest contribution in the archive
There were many contributions since then, with specimens coming in one by one or through large donations. History is stacked inside these cabinets. In one folder is a specimen from 1962: a piece of a strawberry bush pulled from outside of a ranger’s cabin. A small box holds a collection of Maine moss sent by a museum in Missouri. Some recent arrivals include plants stored in layers of newsprint dating back to 1936. The collection has grown to contain an estimated 100,000 specimens.
The plants are stored on “chemically stable, acid-free paper,” explains Stephanie Tanzella, a second-year ecology student who spends 10 hours a week maintaining specimens in the herbarium as a work study job. The paper is thinner than cardboard, but heavy enough to support the weight of a plant without bending. They’re all labeled with data – who collected them, where and what the plant is. Then the mounted plants are placed into olive-green and black cabinets marked with messages reminiscent of a foreign library: “Case 29 (Dicots). Orobanchacae (part) – Podostemaceae.”
A major emphasis of the herbarium is the preservation and storage of endangered and threatened plants in Maine. The file cabinets of the herbarium could be the last place people will see these plants, stored in these paper binders. In this sense, the archive is an important piece of Maine’s natural legacy – a way of recognizing the way Maine’s grass and flower populations have changed between 1865 and today.
Tanzella’s job includes finding and repairing damaged plants from the collection. It is tedious work. With grasses, it can take 20 minutes per specimen.
“When you first get hired, Chris [Campbell] shows you around and tells you all the stuff you have to do, and then he’s required . to show you the chemicals you might encounter in the workplace,” Tanzella said. “So he brought out this sheet with a description of Elmer’s glue.”
There used to be more chemicals, she explains. In order to preserve the plants and repel insects, the herbarium would treat specimens with pesticides or other preservatives. Now, volunteers put them into a freezer unit to kill bugs and diseases.
The specimens are delicate, and her work to repair them involves a paintbrush and a bottle of glue.
The process of repairing a plant is kind of tragic. Tanzella pulled out one specimen that sits splayed out across the paper, its stems bent and twisted like tangled hair.
“You should be able to get a sense of what the plant looks like when it’s alive,” Tanzella says. She applies thin lines of glue to the back of some grass. The idea is to make the plant look like it is in bloom and thriving – it is reconstructive surgery for a dead plant.
For Tanzella, the archive is less of a morgue and more of a time machine.
“In the back, there are collections of really old resources,” Tanzella explains as she places a piece of wax paper over her repaired grass specimen. “They kind of make me feel like ‘Dr. Livingston, African explorer’ sometimes. There’s a lot of history in what’s in here.”
Tanzella places a piece of cardboard over the wax paper. “You want to keep some of the moisture in there, so they don’t become too dry or brittle.” She placed three bricks on top of the cardboard to push the glue down and smooth out the grass.
“You could just apply strips of fabric to it, but I just don’t think it looks as good,” Tanzella says.
While the herbarium is primarily a research library for people looking to identify plants or the changes in plants and populations over time, the objects are also a joy just to look at.
“There’s a natural beauty to plants that anyone can relate to,” says Campbell, who said he still sees them from an aesthetic viewpoint, despite the time he has spent with them.
The simplicity makes them beautiful. They stretch out across acid-free paper like line drawings, or silhouettes. It comes through in almost every specimen here – a sense of what drives a person to grab a strand of grass in a single moment and keep it there, on a piece of paper, for 150 years.
