The road to herbaria: Teaching and learning about biology, aesthetics, and the history of botany

Having recently published a book on herbaria, collections of preserved plants, I look back on my career teaching biology and the experiences that led me to the world of dried plants. My first job was teaching non-science majors, to which I devoted 45 years. Over that time, I worked to make biological inquiry as fascinating to my students as it was to me. I found that the private side of science, how science is actually done, was a good entry point with stories about the wrong turns, difficulties, and joys of research. This led me to biographies and essays by biologists, works on the philosophy and history of science, and interest in the relationship between science and art. Eventually these avenues brought me to the aesthetics of biology and then to botanical art and finally to where these streams seemed to come together in herbaria. I literally fell in love with them. Specimens contain a rich history of people and places, of exploration, colonization, exploitation, and the development of modern botany. Herbaria today are key to documenting and conserving the earth’s biodiversity and tracing how climate change is shaping it. Through digitization, herbaria are an essential component of bioinformatics.