The Newberry College Herbarium

Science & Math Building Room 231
Curator: Charles N. Horn, PhD

COLLECTING AND PRESERVING PLANT SPECIMENS

MAKING A COLLECTION
Essentially all plant specimens represent collections that were made during a field trip.  These trips can be as close as your back yard or as far away as another continent, or any distance in between.  Several items should be kept in mind in order to make an excellent collection.  First, find a representative plant or branch; specimens really need to have flowers and/or fruits (sori for fern or cones for pines).  You should avoid specimens with heavy insect or other damage.  Second, in an ideal situation, you would collect an entire plant to preserve; however, it's obvious that a tree is not appropriate.  Instead, the collection should be large or small enough so as to fit within a normally folded newspaper.  Most professional plant presses allow for easy use of newspaper. 

You can press your specimen immediately in the field or put them in a bag with a little water for later processing.  Specimens need to be dried within about two days to allow for them to be ideally preserved.  To dry a specimen, press it on half of an unfolded newspaper.  Have several leaves facing both upward and downward.  Once your material is flattened on the newspaper, fold the other half over and use stiff paper or cardboard to further flatten the plant.  Corrugated cardboard is ideal as the press needs to have a mechanism to allow air flow through in order to allow fast drying.  Ideally, use dry air at 55^oC for the quickest drying time.  Professional botanists use drying ovens which force warm dry air through the cardboard, thus pulling the moisture out of a specimens within 24-48 hours.

Once dry, specimens need to be stored in a dust free, insect free, and dry (low humidity) location.

MAKING A SPECIMEN VALUABLE
Quality specimens need certain information about it's origin in order to be of value.  Specific location information is needed so that a future botanist can visit the site.  Also, each specimen should have the date of collection, collector, and scientific name of the plant; sometimes, this last bit of information is a problem.  Further, it's always nice to also have information on the habitat including soil (sand, clay) and moisture (dry upland, swamp), habit of the plant (herb, vine, tree), and a collection number.  This last bit of information typically goes along with the collector, and is a reference to allow the collector of large numbers of plants to find field notes at a later time.  Below is an example of a plant label.

Photograph of a specimens label:

Information key for specimen label:

Herbarium name (abbreviation)
special information about collection series

species name and authority
plant family (all have the ending -aceae)

Ecological information, including habitat, growth form, and flower or fruit color.

STATE. COUNTY. Location.  [Many like to also see latitude/longitude and/or GPS coordinate information]

                                                        with other person(s)
date of collection                              collector & collection #

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This page copyright by Charles N. Horn, first generated 10 April 2005, last updated 13 March 2007.
Department of Biology and Chemistry  |  Newberry College, Newberry, South Carolina