At the dawn of the 20th century, the Bronx remained a natural landscape, Queens had yet to sprout row houses, and the only way to get to Fort Lee, New Jersey, from Washington Heights was by ferry, not the George Washington Bridge. Around this time, faculty and students from Barnard ventured from Morningside Heights into this natural landscape to collect and catalog hundreds of plant specimens. Today, more than 100 years later, those same delicate leaves and flowers are at the center of a new faculty/student project: digitization.
Evelyn Twimasi ’27, a computational biology major, is working with Professor Hilary Callahan, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Biological Sciences, to scan and digitize the collection. Their work is not only an act of preservation but also a rediscovery of the College’s scientific legacy.
“The herbarium is a record of Barnard’s science origins,” said Callahan. “There’s actually a record of predevelopment Bronx, Queens, and Fort Lee. These specimens were collected before railroads and subways reshaped the landscape.”
Today, as the herbarium awaits a new home in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Science Center, it rests safely in the climate-controlled Barnard Archives at the Milstein Center. Housed for the past 50 years at Altschul Hall, the collection originated under the care of Emily Gregory, a pioneering botanist and the first woman professor hired at Barnard. Gregory was part of the same intellectual circle that founded the New York Botanical Garden.
“It’s very clear from looking at the collection that this group of experts focused very intently on helping Barnard initiate what I like to call ‘an herbarium of her own,’ to paraphrase Virginia Woolf botanically,” Callahan added.
For Twimasi, preserving the original collectors’ work has fostered a newfound respect for students that came before her.
“They must have been really smart and careful,” she said. “Just the art of identifying different species and organizing them is impressive. And to think that Barnard students helped to create this whole collection — that’s something really special.”
She is particularly appreciative of the collection’s care over time.
“A lot of them look like they were just collected recently,” said Twimasi. “It’s crazy to think that these have been kept in such good shape for over a hundred years.”
Because she grew up near the Bronx’s Pelham Parkway, Twimasi recognizes several species as ubiquitous to the city, such as the leaves of the ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba). And yet it’s still a stretch for her to imagine the Bronx as countryside.
“It’s hard to picture it now, but back then there were more forests, more wild plants. The herbarium makes you think about how different the environment used to be.”
The digitization project elevated Twimasi's already growing appreciation for botany.
“We usually just think about animals, but there’s a whole world of plant life here too,” she said. "You might just see a tree or some grass and not think twice, but the herbarium shows how deep the biodiversity really goes.”
The historical record does also give her pause.
“With climate change and the biodiversity crisis we’re facing, it’s more important than ever to understand what ecosystems looked like in the past,” said Twimasi. “We can use that knowledge to make better choices for the future.”
Below are few of the samples scanned by Johanna Rydman of the U.K.-based Max Communications, specialists in digitizing herbariums. Callahan credits Rydman with allowing students to shadow her during the process. Barnard Magazine has retained the Latin names that were in use at the time of collection.
Selections from the Barnard Herbarium
