Cuba and The New York Botanical Garden
Posted in Science on March 11 2010, by Plant Talk
A Century of Plant Exploration and Research
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Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Director, Caribbean Biodiversity Program, and Melissa Tulig, is Associate Director of the Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden. |
The Orchid Show: Cuba in Flower in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory provides an excellent occasion to draw attention to the Botanical Garden’s long history of plant exploration in Cuba and the Garden’s current scientific activities on the largest and most biologically diverse island in the Caribbean.
Beginning in 1903 and as recently as October 2009, the Garden has collaborated with Cuban botanists and institutions in documenting and studying the Cuban flora, collecting more than 20,000 specimens on 23 expeditions. The Garden’s research in Cuba is active and ongoing.
(The black-and-white photo above from the Mertz Library Archives is from an expedition to the Isle of Pines in Cuba led by the Garden’s founder Nathaniel Lord Britton in 1916. The photo below, by Garden scientist Fabián A. Michelangeli, Ph.D., is from the most current expedition and shows Garden scientist Wayt Thomas, Ph.D., at left, with his Cuban student Waldo Bonet collecting sedges.)
One good way to tell this story of more than a century of plant exploration in Cuba is through the more than 12,500 digitized specimen records currently available via the Garden’s C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. Some newly created Web features allow easy access to these data, and we recommend trying the following to explore the Garden’s history in Cuba and some of the plant diversity on the island as told by the specimens.