Collects Shoots and Leaves

Dr. Traverse and the Penn State Herbarium, by Mark T. Shirey

"What's it tellin' ya?" I ask the old man bent over a large, fresh tree stump on S. Pugh St. in State College, PA. "Well," he says, "it was a Maclura pomifera, or Osage-orange tree, a male one, planted about the time of the Civil War, and it most likely marks the corner of a farmer's field that extends over to Frat Row. I'm going to walk over and find the far corner, would you like to join me?" Thus began my acquaintance with Dr. Alfred Traverse, a Penn State Professor Emeritus of Palynology, on track to increase Penn State's Herbarium to over 100,000 plant samples.

On that walk, we had a nice chat about trees and State College's so-called "urban forest." "That's a misnomer; it's not a forest, it's an arboretum," he said. We did find the far corner of that farmer's field, a row of Osage-orange trees between a fraternity and someone's (ok, the Mayor's) driveway. Later, I looked up "Palynology" and thought it should be "pollenology", the study of pollens and spores. Then I looked up "Herbarium", a collection of preserved plant specimens, whole plants or parts, usually in a dried form, mounted on a sheet.

Dr. Traverse is adding 7,000 pages of his own plant specimens to the Herbarium’s existing 95,000 pages in a large room with climate-controlled safes in a very quiet corner of the basement of Whitmore Lab. The Herbarium is designated "PAC" in the national naming convention, after Pennsylvania Agricultural College. (And, while "everyone knows" that Penn State was once the "Central Pennsylvania Farmers High School", Al says he can find no official documentation of this.)

On one visit, Dr. Traverse is adding samples of Phegopteris, also known as Beech ferns. It's slow-going - he double-checks information provided on the sheets, relying on his deep knowledge and a deep pile of reference books. He prints neat labels and chooses folders by color to tell the geographic source of the plants (manila means Pennsylvania, yellow means other North American locations, etc.).

On another visit, I find him bent over, again, this time over a stack of plant samples. "Look at this!" he says, "Plants from 1800s Gettysburg. These ferns saw the Civil War!" And other samples, from Germany, have a handwritten name in the corner of the page, Evan Pugh, first President of Penn State.

Sometimes I think of Dr. Traverse toiling away alone in the basement herbarium, and I think about Dr. Pugh wandering through fields and forests, specimen sheets in hand. I especially think of Al when I walk by where "our" tree, planted around the Civil War, was cut down and now even the stump has been destroyed, on the street named after Dr. Pugh, where Osage-orange shoots still break through the ground every spring.

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P.S. The title refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves, and I wrote this before I read http://www.rps.psu.edu/0105/arboretum.html, which starts, "What are you finding up there?... Pink lady's-slippers... there could be yellow ones, too", whereas my story starts: "What's it tellin' ya?"... Osage-orange".

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