Forty years ago, the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah State University in Logan had to relocate to a ‘temporary’ location in a basement that was supposed to last 9 to 12 months.
Now, over 485 months later, they’re still in that same spot, and dealing with flooding that threatens hundreds of thousands of native plants.
“The grasses, the rushes, the sedges are in there, the monocots, the lilies, the orchids, this room has the dicots," said Leila Shultz, professor emeritus in wildland resources and the former curator of the herbarium, as she walked the length of the herbarium.
“Now we're walking past the gymnosperms," Shultz continued. "There's a case that has cones, and the cones are stored in boxes, but they're always referenced back to the pressed specimen that has the part with the needles.”
Shultz began working at the herbarium in 1973, though she left in 1992 to take a research faculty position in the College of Natural Resources.
“So there's a cone of Pinus edulis," Shultz said. "This one was collected in Arizona. It's bigger than the ones that we normally see here.”
As she walked through the herbarium, she recalled a fateful day in January of 1984.
“The herbarium was on the fourth floor of the plant industry building on the quad at USU. It's now called the geology building. It's been renovated and reoccupied, but there'd been a minor earthquake, and I noticed that there was a crack that was widening in the floor,” Shultz said.
As she explained this discovery, she held the original newspaper clipping from the Utah Statesman that reported on the need for the herbarium to temporarily move due to the faulty floor.
It turns out that the concrete poured in the winter of 1918 cured during freezing weather resulting in a weak floor slab that could not support the weight of the herbarium. Staff were given just two weeks to find a new location for a collection of over 185,000 specimens.
“It was huge to get moved and the basement of the cafeteria building for the high rise dorms was the only space that would work for us, a little incongruous, because usually plant specimens, we worry about bugs eating the material, and here we were in the basement of a cafeteria that has since flooded,” Shultz said.
Now, 40 years later and still there, herbarium staff are dealing with ever increasing floods.
“We've had four floods in four years," Shultz said. "I think this time the water it came up to about eight inches.”
They're desperately looking for a new location to save the collection, which has expanded to over 300,000 specimens and includes every plant species known to grow in Utah.
“This is a really valuable collection. It's the primary collection for the Intermountain Region, which includes all of Nevada, all of Utah, southern Idaho, the Great Basin, part of California and Arizona, down to the Grand Canyon,” Shultz said.
Open 9 to 5 to the general public, the Intermountain Herbarium sees visits from students, staff, regional and foreign researchers, government employees, farmers, neighbors, and just about anyone interested in Utah’s remarkable plant diversity. And at present it's all still being housed in a cafeteria basement.
