Long-lost Plant Specimens Return to Their Roots at NYBG

A forgotten trove of 19th century plant specimens, discovered in a Lehman College dumpster, found new life at the New York Botanical Garden’s William & Lynda Steere Herbarium.

The historic flora samples — carefully dried, pressed, mounted on paper and labeled — sat unnoticed for years before their rescue. Each sheet preserves a fragment of botanical history from a specific time and place, serving as a permanent scientific record of the natural world as it once was.

They were unearthed in Lehman's Science Hall last year by  professor of biological sciences Ed Kennelly and two doctoral students while clearing out a storage closet. There, he stumbled upon an unsuspecting trash cart loaded with paper-stuffed plastic bags.

“At first, I thought they were student projects,” Kennelly recalled.  "It was actually one of the students I was with that recognized they were unusual samples."

Upon closer inspection, they found the bags contained hundreds of preserved specimens dating back to the 1880s, including ones collected by Elizabeth Gertrude Knight Britton, a pioneering botanist who helped establish the New York Botanical Garden, or NYBG, in 1891.

Among the  samples were sprigs of Origanum vulgare, better known as oregano, she gathered near Van Cortlandt Lake in 1896. Other sheets bore names of professors and alumni of the Normal School, now Hunter College. Its Bronx campus was renamed to Lehman College in 1931.

Britton herself was an alumna of the Normal School, where she taught botany shortly after earning her degree. Many of her students studied and conducted fieldwork in the Bronx, which likely explains how the specimens ultimately found their way to the Science Hall.

Eleanor Wurtzel, a biology professor at Lehman, recalled being stunned the first time she laid eyes on the specimens, noting one was pressed between pages of the New York Times published just before the 1929 stock market crash.

“The question was how did this end up here, in a basement bin, instead of preserved where it belonged?” Wurtzel said. "Then we learned that our neuroscientist, Dr. Stephen Redenti, helped protect the collection by moving it."

Like Kennelly, Redenti, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, also came upon the specimens by chance. While relocating his lab to the newly built Science Hall in 2013, he noticed the collection stowed near a subbasement entrance amid a dusty jumble of old equipment and supplies. Though unclear how they ended up there, he transferred them to a storage room for safekeeping. They went untouched until the 2024 discovery.

This past summer, the Garden’s botanists packed and transported the brittle papers, donated by Lehman, to their new home in the largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere.

Each page was stabilized, cleaned and digitally catalogued before being filed into temperature-controlled vaults, joining seven million collections.

For herbarium staff, the new additions are more than a set of curiosities. Plant specimens, once pressed and labeled, become scientific vouchers — snapshots of biodiversity frozen in time. 

“They are hugely valuable in having sort of a base level for what was growing in New York City [120] years ago, what’s growing in New York City now and how we can compare that,” said Nicole Tarnowsky, the herbarium's assistant director.

Comparing historic plants with modern ones allows scientists to track changes in ecosystems overtime, like those caused by habitat loss,  making it a vital resourse for developing conservation strategies for threatened species.

“If you think of each sheet as a data point, we can easily have hundreds of specimens of the same thing that we use as an example to study climate change quite often,” Tarnowsky explained. “We might have one specimen flowering in June a hundred years ago, and another from the same place flowering a month earlier today.”

For Jennifer Bernstein, NYBG president, the moment represented both scientific and symbolic significance. She framed the transfer as “a homecoming” for Britton’s work, reuniting her specimens with the institution she helped to create. Marked by a press conference on Sept. 26, the transfer further recognized a long-lasting Bronx legacy of discovery and collaboration.

“These plants tell a story of care across generations,” Bernstein noted. “From the students who pressed them in the 19th century to the scientists who rediscovered them today, they show how the pursuit of knowledge continues to take root right here in the Bronx.”

Lehman and NYBG formalized a partnership in 1968, both institutions vowing to train generations of botanists through shared research and doctoral study. That collaboration has since produced hundreds of scientists, with students conducting research in the Garden's labs and greenhouses. 

The long-standing agreement offers students earning their Ph.D in plants sciences access to all  NYBG herbarium specimens and its 550-000 volume research library.  

Bernstein pledged the collaboration would continue to florish, adding the Garden was honored to take stewardship of the gift Lehman handed over. 

"Collections like this give us a window into our natural history," she explained. "We cannot protect what we don’t understand."