I’ve been in London now for a full month! I feel unbelievably lucky to be here. Last week was my first two full days at the museum, and they found me working with everything from newly acquired specimens to historical collections. At one point I was shuffling handful after handful of type specimens (individual plants that define the description for that plant). It was fantastic!The Natural History Museum is widely recognized as one of the most beautiful buildings in London. It was built in the 1870s. A time when science and acquisition of knowledge was held in high regard. The main halls are stone walled; the ceilings that tower above are split into multiple panels combining into an arch. The building’s details are astounding. On the ceiling tiles of the main hall are enormous panels of botanical paintings depicting a variety of plants. The terracotta brick walls have relief sculptures on them illustrating animals both living and extinct. Glance to your left while walking up a hallway and you may see a fossil popping out of the wall, or a three-dimensional stone monkey seeming to climb the inside of an archway.
The Museum has recently built an entire new wing called the Darwin Center. It is an enormous building; the outside is glass and abuts the Romanesque section without a seam. Within the glass façade is an eight-story “cocoon”-shaped structure, half of which contains collections and the other half offices and laboratories. The new herbarium spaces are temperature controlled with metal cabinets that shift side to side to maximize space. They are gray, cold rooms with no natural light. They work well as long-term storage for herbarium specimens, but are dreary places to spend too much time.
I am working with Mark who is a curator for the British herbarium, and some of the historic collections like the Sloane and John Clayton herbaria. Mark is incredibly knowledgeable; he is laid-back but highly productive. This lends itself to accomplishing tasks that feel meaningful while having interesting conversation and educational asides.
As I become familiar with the layout and processes, my work will be centered within the herbarium. I assist with the organization of the historical collections, including repairing damage and interpreting handwriting that looks ancient. I will be continuing a predecessor’s project of cataloging and filing new specimens for the British Herbarium, and later I will be collecting new specimens as well.
After working on my own for a while, we would have a task to accomplish, and would go off into the various herbaria to collect specimens. We went first to one of the old herbarium sites to gather some of the specimens still there. Though a closet compared to other storage sites, the room felt massive. The longest wall is one row of herbarium cabinets. Ten feet high, they seemed to tower over you; the row continued far enough, I felt my head cock to the side trying to get the entire row in view. Perpendicular to this wall are rows upon rows of cabinets. The cabinets glow warm in the natural light coming in from the windows above. The single-pane glass is a poor insulator. While the room seems a cathedral to humans, the temperature and humidity changes are torture to the specimens.
While the contents of these cabinets have all been moved to the Darwin center, the contents of the boxes above have not. Stacked upon the cabinets are herbarium boxes full of specimens. The boxes are stacked four or five high and cover the entire room. Covered in dust on the outside, odd powdery mysteries on the inside, they feel like they could be straight out of the middle ages. These are the poor souls that haven't yet made it into the herbarium stacks. They are specimens collected anywhere in the last two hundred years. Much of them have never been inventoried, never looked at since they were donated to the museum. Type specimens and plants yet unknown are certainly lurking in the stacked boxes.
Mark and I gathered specimens for a colleague. They are beginning a study on the effect of climate change on certain native species to the British Isles, and using the historical herbaria as reference. We then went into the Sloane herbarium which has some of the oldest collections in the museum. There are bound herbaria from the 17th century from many different collectors. Two were of certain interest. One was essentially a German apothecary's “field guide.” It contained pressed plants both with a scientific name and description and the indigenous name. Another collection was the original (if I remember correctly) illustrations and pressed specimens from Sloane’s Flora of Jamaica. There were many hand-drawn illustrations, clearly drawn from the very specimens pressed. The pen-and-ink drawings were beautiful. Having studiously poured over many such botanical drawings of my own, I felt immediately connected to the personal effort and value saturated throughout the bindings, to say nothing for grasping the idea that I was seeing someone's detailed studies of 340 years prior.
I have been promised enough work to exhaust my interest in the museum. I look forward to what it would take for that to be true.
 |
| sorting herbarium specimens in the new Darwin Center |
