By Steve Scarpa, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications
The plants have browned over the hundreds of years since they were gathered. The pages on which they are mounted are yellowed and brittle. Still, one of the Yale Peabody Museum’s newest additions to its botany collection can offer a unique window on the past.
This newly acquired pressed plant collection once stored in a Southington farmhouse offers one of the earliest glimpses of New England plant life.
The collection of over 100 specimens was donated this past Fall by the descendants of Roswell Moore. Moore, who was born in 1761 and died in 1847, amassed a collection of hundreds of plant specimens in the first decade of the 19th century. The plants were carefully mounted on thin paper and, in some instances, tucked within old editions of the Connecticut Courant, the precursor to the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the country.
“These specimens are among the very earliest records of many plant species occurring in New England,” said Susan Butts, director of collections and research. “They are invaluable sources of scientific data for ecological research and biodiversity conservation efforts.”
The Botany division’s work on this collection will now begin. “A Peabody Museum intern will help curate and database this collection and utilize the resulting data to help better understand floristic change in Connecticut and New England over the past two centuries,” Butts said.
Roswell Moore was diligent in documenting his collection. He kept a beautifully handwritten index of his findings, offering the genus of each plant and placing them in numbered groupings.
As Patrick Sweeney, the Peabody’s botany collections manager, Mariana Di Giacomo, museum conservator, and their teams perform conservation and curatorial work on the collection , they will confirm the identifications of the specimens. Science and naming conventions for plants have evolved, so modern botanists can’t take Moore’s word for it.
“Accepted names change over time. The concepts of species change over time. He could’ve gotten something wrong,” Sweeney said.
On a recent visit to the botany collection, Sweeney carefully opened the cardboard box in which Moore’s work was transported to the Peabody. He showed a pressed orchid, a species that is currently endangered in Connecticut. He looked at the written text to learn more.
“The labels associated with each specimen are quite important. In addition to the name of the plant, they have spatiotemporal data. It’s where plants were occurring at particular times. That’s super valuable for ecological research, for conservation, and even evolutionary research,” Sweeney said.
The practice of pressing plants and drying them for scientific research dates to the mid-1500s, around the same time as the rise of botanical gardens. “The practice developed around medicinal plants and then, later, around taxonomy and classification,” Sweeney said. “People wanted to communicate what they were studying. They figured out that pressing a plant and drying it was a great way to represent what they were talking about, versus a written description or a stylized illustration.”
Sweeney thinks of the collection in his care as its own kind of botanical library. The plants can tell their own stories about nature, evolution, and the history of our planet, he said. Moore’s contribution will help us understand how Connecticut has changed over the past two centuries.
It will take some time for Moore’s plants to be fully documented, conserved, and entered into the Peabody’s collection, Sweeney said.
Once there, the possibilities available to researchers are myriad. For example, Moore’s work could be used to track plant distributions over time. They could help determine the rise and fall of invasive plant species which can degrade native ecosystems. They can be used to determine the presence of carbon in the air tied to the burning of fossil fuels over time. They could even serve as sources of DNA for molecular studies.
Moore’s collection, like many of the Peabody’s 14 million objects, offers scientific possibility.
“There is always a sense of discovery. It’s fun to learn about what’s in (the collection). Is there something rare? Something unexpected? Who collected it and why? What can these plants tell us about life on the planet? These stories are particularly interesting to me,” Sweeney said.