Pitcher this: MUN herbarium home to thousands of N.L. botanicals

Sarah Antle · CBC News

· Posted: Jun 28, 2025 8:30 AM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

In a country afloat of gangly metallic cabinets, Julissa Roncal cautiously flicks done stacks of manila folders. They're filled with pages of expertly pressed and dried works specimens. 

"See the small berries there? How bash you adust a fleshy effect and enactment it connected a paper, wholly dry?" she said, pulling retired a leafage with a flat, adust subdivision with berries connected it. They're perfectly preserved and dated 1966. 

"It does instrumentality a batch of time, effort and creation to enactment those fleshy fruits connected a dried specimen that volition past for decades."

Roncal is the curator of the Memorial University Agnes Marion Ayre Herbarium. The postulation has astir 100,000 specimens tucked successful a tiny bureau connected Mount Scio Road. 

"They are fundamentally cataloged oregon distributed pursuing a peculiar bid that represents the classification," she explained. 

"Each specimen is labelled with the twelvemonth it was collected, the idiosyncratic who collected it, and wherever it was found."

She said astir 80 to 90 per cent of the specimens are from Newfoundland and Labrador, and the remainder are from different parts of the world. 

The collection, Roncal said, is not lone important for probe and history, but due to the fact that it belongs to the radical of the province. 

"This is simply a specimen of the Newfoundland provincial flower," she said, pulling retired a leafage with a dried pitcher works adhered to it, titled Carbonear, 1945. 

For decades, researchers and botanists person dried, pressed, and preserved specimens from 3 main categories: algae, mosses and vascular plants. 

The postulation is utilized to bid biology students astatine MUN, who larn astir databases, manipulating ample information sets, and get acquisition successful botany and biology successful systematics, taxonomy and taxon distribution.

"We tin extract DNA, for example, from these specimens for genomics research," Roncal said.  

And depending connected the research, the postulation tin besides assistance successful climatological research. 

"We tin besides way whether these taxon person changed their flowering times oregon their physiologies passim time," she said. 

"For example, we tin observe whether a peculiar taxon is flowering sooner oregon aboriginal and correlate it with clime change, truthful that accusation tin beryllium observed oregon rescued from the accusation that is hosted oregon housed here." 

Roncal said determination are astir sixteen 1000 specimens digitized and accessible to the public. 

The history

Work astatine the herbarium started years earlier Roncal's tenure arsenic curator. She describes the herbarium's namesake — Agnes Marion Ayre — as an influential figure. 

"She was a suffragist, she fought for women's rights, for voting. So she's decidedly an inspiration beyond botany for each of us," she said.

Ayre was an amateur botanist, and collected and preserved immoderate of the specimens successful the collection. Roncal said those contributions were the starting point. 

"So it is the effect of decades of botanical exploration and accumulation of these specimens," she said. 

But Ayre didn't conscionable catalogue works taxon she found, she besides painted them with watercolours portion successful the field. There are astir 2 1000 of Ayre's paintings betwixt the Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the herbarium. 

It's a process that Roncal said added much item than a emblematic property would. 

"Painting allows you to give clip to deep, thorough reflection of the works that you person successful beforehand of you," Roncal said, looking astatine a coating from the 1920s.

"So that's wherefore the operation of some is perfect to truly get to cognize what taxon and place with assurance what you're looking at," she said. "And putting a sanction to what you're looking at." 

Roncal said her squad is working connected digitizing the remainder of the postulation to marque it much accessible.

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