I have always been interested in collecting rare plants. During the pandemic, I even started collecting and pressing four-leaf clovers which is why working at a herbarium is the perfect job for me. Last summer, I worked at the Liberty Hide Bailey Hortorium and Herbarium which is part of Cornell University. Imagine a library where dried plant specimens are collected and filed by species and location, that is what a herbarium is. A hortorium is like a herbarium with one difference, instead of containing plants from nature, it consists of cultivated plants. Liberty Hide Bailey, the founder of the herbarium, was the first person to have an interest in collecting cultivated plants and was the one to coin the term hortorium. My favorite part of the job was going on collecting trips to find plants which we would turn into specimens. When looking for plants to turn into a specimen there are a few main things to look for. The first thing to look for is flowers or fruit which are often the interest of studies and thus more valuable as specimens.
Another thing to look for is rare plants which may be hard to find, or only endemic to specific areas. Finally, you should look for invasive species because it is important to track the locations and rate at which they spread. My favorite collecting trip we went on was to McLean bog, a natural area protected by the university where we got to see Sarecenea or New World pitcher plants and Drosera, more commonly called sundews. These plants are carnivorous which means that they eat animals for nutrients. Many people think they do this to get energy, but they actually feed on insects to get nutrients, specifically nitrogen, as they live in nutrient-poor soils. This internship has made me realize that I want to do work with physical plants, either growing them or going to specific regions to collect specimens. After collecting, we needed to prepare each plant to become a specimen, which consisted of pressing the plants flat, drying them, freezing them to kill bugs, identifying them, making labels, mounting them onto archival paper, and finally filing them into the collection. We also did other tasks not related to making new specimens which included entering old specimens into the database to make finding data easier for researchers, reorganizing the collection, and finding specimens for researchers. During the internship, I got much better at plant identification and learned how to prepare and label plant specimens. The skills I learned at the herbarium will help me both in my future work and in my personal hobbies.
