In my last post I recounted how my colleagues and I explored eastern Cuba, collecting different members of the family Melastomataceae. Only a dozen species in this group, which includes plants known as meadow beauties, princess flowers and Johnny berries, are found in the United States, but it is very diverse in the tropics. In Cuba, there are more than 200 species of Melastomataceae, and more than 150 of those are endemic, found only on that island.
Here are some representatives from the Sierra Maestra Mountains that we encountered on our expedition. Most of these species are adapted to the cloud forest conditions of the mountains.
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the past three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species. This is the last in his series of posts about his 2014 field trip.
The trip is all but over. We arrived in Punta Arenas at midnight between the 27th and 28th, almost a day early. I asked Ernesto Davis to phone ahead and see if our hotel reservation could be updated. After a rough night the day before, everyone was ready for stable beds and hot showers. Fortunately, the hotel had space and our rooms were ready when we arrived, luggage in hand.
We returned to the ship early the next morning to gather our collections. The entire crew was in attendance when we arrived at the trusty Doña Pilar. We still had specimens on the dryers and promptly started dealing with them. There was little wind, so I was able to close up my paper bags on the deck. Every last one of my collections was completely dry. Everyone else still had damp specimens that would need additional time before being packed up.
Early in the expedition, I asked the crew if, after our trip, I might have the small Magellanic flag that the Doña Pilar flew. Ships on previous expeditions only flew the Chilean flag, which I asked for and received during our last trip. Perhaps they hadn’t flown the Magellanic flag because the captain was from further north, in Chiloé. Regardless, I was delighted when this year’s captain presented me with the tattered flag that had flown over the ship that had served us so well. I collect flags, in part as a true souvenir of my collecting localities. Some hold special memories. I will proudly display this one in my New York office.
Ina Vandebroek, Ph.D., is an ethnomedical research specialist at The New York Botanical Garden‘s Institute of Economic Botany. One of her research interests is studying how immigrant populations in New York City use traditional plant-based remedies in their health care.
From left to right: Dr. Thiago Araujo (BR), Dr. Ina Vandebroek (USA), Dr. Ulysses Albuquerque (BR), Dr. Ana Ladio (AR), Dr. Romulo Alves (BR)
The science of ethnobiology studies the relationships among peoples, nature, and culture. It is a multidisciplinary field that uses methods from the social and natural sciences, including botany, ecology, agriculture, medicine, zoology, anthropology, archaeology and others. Ethnobiologists have diverse research interests, and an international conference presents a great opportunity to learn from specialists.
From the crowds that attend The New York Botanical Garden’s annual orchid exhibition, it’s clear that this family of flowering plants exerts a fascination on gardeners and plant lovers almost without equal in the horticultural world.
Count Prof. James D. Ackerman among the devotees. From his days as a graduate student in northern California, he’s devoted his scientific career to the study of Orchidaceae. Prof. Ackerman, who teaches biology at the University of Puerto Rico, is the lead author of Orchid Flora of the Greater Antilles, recently published by NYBG Press.
With full scientific treatments of 594 orchid species, the book covers the largest islands in the West Indies, including Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola, the island that comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
I had a chance to chat with Prof. Ackerman during his recent visit to the Botanical Garden, where he gave a talk about his time in the field cataloging the orchids of the Greater Antilles. He was also planning to see The Orchid Show: Key West Contemporary, which closes next Monday, April 21.
Dr. Dennis Stevenson with Dasypogon hookeri, locally known as the pineapple bush
I spent the month of November 2013 in Australia on fieldwork for a project on the coevolution of certain plant groups and the specialized wasps that pollinate them. The plan was to collect the plants with their pollinators in the act, and to that end, I was accompanied by an entomologist, Dr. James Carpenter of the American Museum of Natural History. We also had collaborators from various herbaria and natural history museums across the continent.
The itinerary was a drive of more than 3,000 miles from Adelaide in South Australia to Brisbane in Queensland, following the River Murray in South Australia and then another river, the Darling, to Broken Hill, a mining city in New South Wales. From there, our route took us to Bourke, then Cunnamulla, and east to Brisbane. At both the start and end of the itinerary there was rain, so late spring flowers were in full bloom. But in between, things did not go quite according to plan because the Outback was in deep drought. In Cunnamulla, a police officer told us it had been more than a year since the last rainfall!
Every time I walk by the California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) that bloom in the Rock Garden at The New York Botanical Garden, I get a little homesick. I am a California girl, born and raised. As it turns out, I have the botanist Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon to thank for making this poppy the state flower of California and an emblem of home.
Sara Allen Plummer was born in Maine in 1836, schooled in Massachusetts, taught art in New York City, and in 1869 made her way to Santa Barbara, California to improve her health. Upon settling in, she opened up a stationery store and lending library (the first public library in Santa Barbara) and became fascinated by the local flora. She began drawing and collecting specimens of plants, and her store became a cultural hub in town, offering art exhibits, lectures, and readings. Sara met John Gill Lemmon (botanist, teacher, Civil War veteran) in 1876 when he came to California to study and collect the local plants. Their shared interest in botany no doubt played a part in their love affair, and the two were married in 1880.
Highly respected among her male peers in the 18th century, Jane Colden received great accolades and is generally recognized as the first female American botanist. Yet she went largely unnoticed by the greater scientific community for well over a century after her death.
Entry in Colden’s manuscript describing the new species Gardenia. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Born in New York City in 1724, she grew up in the Hudson Valley on the estate of her father, Cadwallader Colden, who was a lieutenant governor of New York. The area was then called Coldenham, but we would recognize it as a region just west of Newburgh in Orange County, New York.
Amy Weiss is a curatorial assistant in The New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, where she catalogues and preserves plant specimens from around the world.
Mary Katharine Brandegee
Novels are full of unconventional women, from Jane Austen’s spunky Elizabeth Bennet to the brilliant botanist Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent novel The Signature of All Things. But Mary Katharine Layne Curran Brandegee (1844-1920), a real-life botanist, could certainly have taught these fictional women a thing or two about forging your own path.
Born Mary Katharine Layne in 1844 to a Tennessee farmer, she was a young girl when the Laynes moved west to California during the 1849 gold rush, eventually settling in Folsom, California. She married Hugh Curran, a constable, in 1866, but he died of alcoholism in 1874. Often described as strong-willed, Mrs. Curran moved to San Francisco the following year and enrolled at the University of California’s medical school. She was only the third woman to do so.
At that time, botany was an essential component of medical science education, and after receiving her degree, Curran followed the advice of an instructor and pursued botany rather than practice medicine. She became a member of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1879, continuing her botanical training by collecting plants throughout California and working in the Academy’s herbarium. In 1883, Curran was appointed a curator of botany, one of the first women to hold such a position at a major museum, and in 1891 she became the sole botanical curator.
One evening as twilight settled over the garden of Hammarby, an idyllic farm near Uppsala in Sweden, a botanically inclined young lady noticed flashes of light emanating from her family’s nasturtium flowers (Tropaeolum majus, commonly known as Indian cress, or indiankrasse in Swedish). Intrigued by this phenomenon, she wrote a paper about it, which was published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1762, when she was 19. Her name was Elisabeth Christina von Linné, and she was a daughter of the preeminent scientist Carl Linnaeus (also known as Carl von Linné), who devised the system for naming species that scientists use to this day.
As a woman, Lisa Stina (as she was known) was not permitted to have formal schooling, but she developed a great interest in botany, which her father supported. The mystery of the “flashing flowers” came to be known as the “Elizabeth Linnaeus Phenomenon,” which some believed to be caused by phosphorescence or electricity. Professor F. A. W. Thomas of Germany, however, explained in a 1914 paper that the phenomenon is optical, a result of the way our eyes perceive the flowers’ colors in the twilight.
Visitors to the Adult Education classrooms on Garden grounds may have noticed a recent addition to the walls of the Watson Building in a series of framed, vintage botanical posters. These treasures were discovered in storage while refurbishing the botany lab, and we could not bear to dispose of such a colorful glimpse into the history of botanical science. While the paper had begun to yellow, the ink was flaking, and a few of the posters were beyond saving, Center Art Studio in Manhattan graciously took on the challenge of restoring ten of these double-sided instructional posters as a gift to the NYBG.
