Notes From Nature Talk

HERBARIUM-Univ of South Florida-Why are they all cultivated????

  • Bonnie123 by Bonnie123

    So far almost all/maybe all of the ones I've done for Unv So Florida are cultivated. I'm wondering, Is the whole collection cultivated? Maybe it's just me but I'm finding it very odd that there would be so many specimens that are Cultivated. I actually had one that showed it was "Bought by ..." at a Florist, this is just so strange to me. Having taken Botany for a year and having a Botany collection we were not allowed to have anything cultivated. Maybe that is just an unwritten rule for poor botany students to keep us on our toes and allow us the joy of foraging in the woods, and Museums don’t mind. While I realize there will sometimes be a few cultivated ones in a collection from a garden or one that is growing wild, it is just so strange to see the whole collection be cultivated, maybe this is the Cultivated Collection. The one from the Florist is the most odd yet, it looked like a clover (maybe it was a four leaf clover and he was just so excited he had to add it to his collection). Does anyone have any ideas???

    I failed to put the one bought at the Florist into Discuss, if anyone sees it maybe you could put it in Discuss for me, maybe it is a four leaf clover.

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  • md68135 by md68135 scientist

    Hi @Bonnie123 ,

    I had thought that I had written a blog post about this collections, but now I can't find it.

    In any case, the USF collection is unique in this respect. We don't expect to have many collections with so many cultivated plants, but they do pop up from time to time in the other collections.

    If you visit an herbarium the vast majority of specimens will be wild collected. Some collections do have significant collections of cultivated plants and there can be different reasons for this this. For example, when I worked at the Denver Botanic Gardens several years ago we had a project to document a collection of water lilies. Many selections had been developed right there at the garden and we wanted to have them documented in the long term record.

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  • Bonnie123 by Bonnie123 in response to md68135's comment.

    Thanks for the info, just so different from when I collected specimens. I'm assuming maybe they just decided to stick all the cultivated ones together in one collection. Thanks again for the response.

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