Miami's herbarium home to about 650,000 dried plants - and no beetles

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By Margo Kissell, university news and communications

A South African plant
Mike Vincent is in search of coffee — but not the kind to fill his cup.
He’s on the hunt for a dried plant from the genus Coffea arabica.
The curator of the Willard Sherman Turrell Herbarium in Upham Hall winds his way through the tall metal cabinets spread across three floors known as the stacks. He walks down a row and opens a cabinet, revealing neatly stacked sheets of paper containing preserved coffee plants.
He pulls out one that was once part of a doctoral student’s botanical study in South America.
“This was being grown in a family’s garden in a village in Peru,” said Vincent (Miami ’78, MA ’83, Ph.D. ’91), an instructor of biology who has been the curator for 30 years.
The herbarium is a systematically arranged collection of approximately 650,000 dried plants from around the world. The collection dates back to the 1790s and burgeoned in 1967 with the purchase of Oberlin College’s sizable collection.

Mike Vincent in the herbarium stacks. View the video below to see the smallest flowering plant in the world.
Still believed to be Ohio’s largest herbarium, the collection has a variety of specimens, including vascular plants as well as bryophytes, fungi, lichens, algae and fossil plants.
“We have all sorts of things. Basically anything you can think of, we probably have representations of it,” he said.
After working here so many years, Vincent jokes that he has the research facility mapped out in his head, which means he can find things quickly such as black pepper, orchids and clovers.
His “lifelong study of clovers” got its start by accident.
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Vincent said he began working on the classification of the genus Trifolium in the late 1980s during a field trip to south central Ohio. It was raining, the clay ...

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