The Missouri Botanical Garden now boasts the largest herbarium in North America, with more than 7 million plant samples, or specimens. And taxonomist Charlotte Taylor has her own special distinction. She has named more plant species than any other living woman on the planet.
In the herbarium are about 8,000 specimens Taylor has collected herself, although she's probably collected as many as 11,000, counting specimens housed in other herbaria. (An herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens for scientific purposes).
Listen to Debbie Monterrey's interview and herbarium tour with Taylor:
The distinction of having named more plants than any other living woman came as a surprise to Taylor who says she was contacted a few years ago by some British women who were crunching and analyzing data. They told her she was the fourth or fifth most productive woman in the world for naming plant species.
She says she published a number of new species and moved up the list, then the women ahead of her died. "So I'm it now," she says with a laugh. She is credited with naming about 500 species.
Examples of herbarium specimens at the Missouri Botanical Garden's Bayer CenterDebbie Monterrey
Taylor says in some ways her job is like solving puzzles. People send in samples for her to identify. Sometimes she is stumped, other times she realizes the reference books were wrong and misidentified a plant.
She unveils two long rows of mysteries: plant samples from Africa that no one has identified because there are no taxonomists specializing in those plants. Some have been there for more than 20 years. And then there are the boxes and boxes of new specimens coming in from places like Madagascar and Peru, where researchers are going into places no one has ever been before.
The reason the Botanical Garden is investing in and supporting the identification of plants? Conservation. You can't save a plant if you don't know it's there, if you don't know what it is, and no one has named it.
