Inside the Tower’s Herbarium

The UT Tower is full of history, much of it its own. Within its 27 floors sit many libraries, offices and administrators, but did you know that the primary occupants of some floors are plants?

The Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center, a collection of preserved plant specimens for botanical research and classification, occupies 10 floors of the Tower currently less suitable for people's work or studying. Established in 1890, the herbarium contains over a million specimens, including one collected by Charles Darwin in 1835 during the voyage of the Beagle. The oldest specimen is over 250 years old, and the most recent one was collected this year.

A part of the College of Natural Sciences' Biodiversity Center , the center is the second-largest herbarium in Texas and contains the most holdings of Texas plants in the world. Specimens from the collection are cited in at least 250 papers and books annually, and that number is growing thanks to the team's work to make the collections digitally accessible.

For the past 40 years the collection has been housed in the Tower, spread between the second and 20th floors, growing at a rate of over 5,000 specimens per year. And the 5,000 is just what's officially processed. George Yatskievych, the center's current curator, leads a small but dedicated staff that receives more donations than can be processed in a year. Even with the 25-40 undergrads who work during the fall and spring semesters, if the center were to stop taking in specimens, they would still have a backlog that would take almost a decade to fully process, Yatskievych says.