Saturday, February 8, 2025
1–2pm
76 Franklin Avenue, 10301

Join the Staten Island Museum’s Director of Natural Science, Colleen Evans, in a journey through the Museum’s Herbarium.

Tucked in a building in St. George, the museum has a collection of over 26,000 pressed plants or herbarium specimens. These create an irreplaceable record of the botanical life that has existed on Staten Island dating back to the mid-19th century. While the collection itself is typically only open to scientific researchers, the collection has been photographed and is available online.

Colleen will bring along some plant specimens from the collection as well as demonstrate how to access the rest of it on the internet!

About the Herbarium

The Staten Island Museum herbarium (SIM) contains over 25,000 specimens, focused on the flora of Staten Island and the northeastern United States. It is a complete record of the flora of Staten Island, from the 1860s to the present. The core of the herbarium was donated by co-founders Arthur Hollick and Nathaniel Lord Britton, and is composed of specimens they collected during the 1870s-1880s. Specialized sub-collections include hybrid oaks (Hollick/Britton/Davis) and hybrid violets and ferns (Philip Dowell). Aside from vascular plants, the collection also contains mosses, lichens, algae, fungi and slime molds.