[FAS] Culture and Belief 61:Gender and Science: From Marie Curie to Gamergate

The Harvard University Herbaria house five comprehensive, non-circulating research libraries that are managed collectively as the Botany Libraries. The combined collections are rich repositories of rare books, manuscripts, field notes, and historical correspondence, as well as current monographs, journals and electronic media.

The Arnold Arboretum in Cambridge specializes in the identification and classification of Old World plants with emphasis on Asia. Subject areas cover systematic botany, floras of the Old World, taxonomy, dendrology, early forestry, and other materials on woody plants, as well as pre-Linnean works. 

The Economic Botany Library of Oakes Ames specializes in materials related to economic botany or the commercial exploitation of plants. Subject areas cover ethnobotany, medicinal plants, hallucinogens and narcotics, crop plants, edible and poisonous plants, herbals and other rare pre-Linnean works, and Linneana.

The Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany specializes in organisms that reproduce by spores, without flowers or seeds. Subject areas cover fungi, bryophytes, lichens, algae, and pre-Linnean works.

The Gray Herbarium Library specializes in the identification and classification of  New World plants with emphasis on North American plants. Subject areas cover systematic botany, taxonomy, floras of the New World, bibliography, the history of botany, and pre-Linnean works.

The Oakes Ames Orchid Library specializes exclusively on the identification and classification of the orchid family or Orchidaceae. 

The Libraries support the academic and research interests of the faculty, researchers, staff and students of the Harvard University Herbaria and are open to an international community of scholars.

The library is located at 22 Divinity Avenue in Cambridge, MA. 

The Botany Libraries offer service in two reading rooms. The main reading room is located on the second floor of the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH). It is open Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. except for University holidays.

The Farlow Library reading room is located in the Farlow Herbarium which is accessed via the first floor of HUH.  The reading room is open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. until noon except for University holidays. After noon, Farlow materials may be requested at the main reading room.

The Botany Libraries' reading rooms are open to all researchers who register at the service desk. All visitors must present a valid form of identification.  The Botany Libraries' collections do not circulate; all materials are examined in the reading rooms. Users may page materials from the Orchid and Farlow collections until 4:30 p.m. Materials from the Arnold, Gray, and Economic Botany collections may be retrieved until 4:45 p.m.

Researchers may consult archival materials by appointment only, Monday- Friday between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.

If you would like to make an appointment, or have any other questions about the Libraries, contact us at 617-495-2366 or botref@oeb.harvard.edu.

Personal photography of items in the collections using a digital camera may be permitted under certain circumstances.

HOLLIS: Search Botany holdings in Harvard's online catalog, HOLLIS.

Cambridge holdings appear as:

    Botany Ames Orchid: Oakes Ames Orchid Library

    Botany Arnold (Cambr.): Library of the Arnold Arboretum

    Botany Econ. Botany: Economic Botany Library of Oakes Ames

    Botany Farlow Library: Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany

    Botany Gray Herbarium: Library of the Gray Herbarium

    Botany Gray/Arnold: Combined Gray/Arnold holdings

The Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library in Jamaica Plain appears in HOLLIS as Botany Arboretum.

Blanche Ames (1878-1969)

Blanche Ames was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1878. Blanche attended Smith College where she became active in the Massachusetts Suffrage Association. A talented artist, she worked as art editor for the Woman's Journal. Her political cartoons in favor of women's suffrage also appeared in the Boston Transcript.  Blanche married Oakes Ames (no relation), a botany professor at Harvard University and she illustrated many of his publications throughout his career. They raised their five children at Borderland in Easton, MA in a house designed by Blanche. She died in 1969. 

 

Eliza B. Blackford  (1847-1935)

Eliza Beulah Blackford was born Eliza Larsh in Eaton, Ohio.  Blackford moved to the Boston area in the early 1890s and enrolled in The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1895 where she studied drawing and painting. The school was one of the most distinguished art schools in the United States even though it was less than 25 yearsold. When Blackford joined the Boston Mycological Club in 1895 she was one of the first women members. She pursued her interest in fungi  by dedicating most of her free time to collecting and painting the organisms she discovered.

Mary Strong Clemens (1873-1968)

Mary Knapp Strong was born in New York on January 3, 1873, and married Joseph Clemens, a Methodist Episcopalian clergyman in 1894. Mary Strong Clemens collected plants in California, Utah, Oklahoma and Texas as Joseph Clemens was transferred from one congregation to the next.  Mary collected in Mindanao and Luzon and traveled to remote regions and ascended mountains of over 3000 meters.  Mary and Joseph collected on the highest and most inaccessible mountains in the Philippines, British N. Borneo, Chihli and Shantung provinces in China, Anam, French Indo-China and New Guinea. 

 

Alice Eastwood (1859-1953)

Alice Eastwood was born in Toronto, Ontario, on January 19, 1859.  Eastwood was a self-taught botanist lacking contacts with other biologists or access to a scientific library. Her earliest guide to unraveling the relationships between Colorado plants was Gray's Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, which covered the flora of the eastern states.  She was offered a position as joint curator at the California Academy of Sciences in 1892 and was appointed Curator and Head of the Department of Botany in 1894. She retained this position until her retirement at the age of ninety in 1949. 

 

Shiu-Ying Hu (1910-2012)  

Shiu-Ying Hu was born on February 22, 1910, in Suchow, Kiangsu, China. She received her B.S. in biology in 1933 from Ginling College and her M.S. in 1937 from Lingnan University. She came to the United States in 1946 to pursue a doctoral degree. She entered Radcliffe College on a full scholarship and became the first Chinese woman to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1949.  After earning her Ph.D., Hu worked as a research botanist at the Arnold Arboretum and Associate Professor at West China Union University, Senior Lecturer at Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, among others.  Dr. Hu was considered to be one of the world's leading plant taxonomists with particular expertise on medicinal plants and orchids. 

 

Lily May Perry (1895-1992)

Lily May Perry was born in New Brunswick, Canada on January 5, 1895. She earned a B.S. from Acadia University in 1921 and continued her studies in botany at Radcliffe College, earning an M.A. in 1925. Following graduation she worked at Harvard’s Gray Herbarium for five years before enrolling at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, to earn a Ph.D. in 1933.  After graduation she returned to Cambridge where Merritt Lyndon Fernald hired her as a herbarium assistant while she looked for a faculty position.  Perry had trouble finding an academic appointment in spite of her impressive credentials.   One rejection letter noted that she was "much too qualified for any position we could offer a woman."  Perry continued to work at Harvard until 1964 in order to complete the manuscript for Medicinal Plants of East and Southeast Asia. 

 

Geneva Sayre (1911-1992)

Geneva Sayre was a teacher, scholar, bryologist, bibliographer, and town historian. She was born on June 12, 1911, in Guthrie, Iowa, and attended Grinnell College from 1929-1933. She studied botany with the noted botanist Henry Conard. She earned an M.A.at the University of Wyoming in 1935 and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1938 where she was an instructor for a short period. She was appointed to the faculty of Russell Sage College in Troy, NY in 1940 and held the position for thirty-two years. She retired in 1972 with the title of Professor Emeritus and relocated to Massachusetts where she was appointed a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Farlow Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany.

 

Edith Henry Scamman (1882-1967)

Edith Scamman was born in Saco, Maine, on November 30, 1882. She spent most of her childhood in Saco and attended Wellesley College where she received a B.A. in English in 1907. She continued her education at Radcliffe College and earned an M.A. in comparative literature in 1909.  She devoted the next twenty-five years to supporting the work of her church and caring for her mother. Following her mother’s death in 1935, she enrolled in botany courses at Radcliffe taught by Harvard botanist Merritt Lyndon Fernald. She became interested in the distribution of plants in the unglaciated regions of Alaska. She made her first collecting trip to Alaska in 1936 and returned in 1937, 1940, 1941, and 1954 for a total of nine trips.

 

Bernice Schubert (1913-2000)

Bernice Schubert was born October 6, 1913, in Boston.  She attended the College of Agriculture (now part of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) in 1935 and earned both an A.M. (1937) and a Ph.D. (1942) from Radcliffe College. She was employed at the Gray Herbarium working as a technical assistant in plant taxonomy and as editorial aide to Professor Merritt Fernald, then director of the Gray Herbarium.   Her own research interests centered on the study of Desmodium and Begonia.  From 1950 to 1951, she conducted research on legumes as a Guggenheim fellow in Europe.  Schubert returned to Harvard in 1962 primarily to serve as editor of the Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, a post she filled until 1975. Schubert served as the first secretary of the Women's Organization at Harvard, and was a founding member of the International Association of Plant Taxonomists.