Last month, Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill announced that Duke’s herbarium — more than 850,000 plant specimens gathered over more than a century — will be transferred intact to the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Combined with UNC’s own collection, it will total roughly 1.7 million specimens, the third-largest university herbarium in the country, after Harvard and Berkeley.
That ranking is impressive. It is also beside the point. A herbarium becomes a great scientific institution not by accumulating specimens, but by building the people and programs that make those specimens useful. The question for North Carolina is whether UNC will build a program worthy of what it has just acquired.
I served as director of the Duke Herbarium for more than 20 years, so let me start with the good news. The specimens will stay in North Carolina. They will stay together. And they are going to an institution that has shown it takes stewardship seriously. Two years ago, when Duke said it could no longer justify keeping the collection, the likelier outcomes were far worse: dispersal to a dozen institutions and the quiet loss of an irreplaceable record. That did not happen, and UNC and the Botanical Garden deserve real credit for it…