In the 1940s, the property on which the garden rested was sold. A housing complex, named Botanic Apartments in homage to what once stood there, was built on top of the garden’s remnants.
History of science lecturer Alistair W. Sponsel says he sometimes questions whether Gray’s legacy has been obscured like his once-flourishing garden—especially when compared to Agassiz, whose name is stamped on a theater in Radcliffe Yard.
Pfister partly attributes this disparity to the fact that, “Gray never fit into the Boston social scene quite as easily as Agassiz.” Sponsel wonders instead if the “controversial figures” like biologists E.O. Wilson and Ernst Mayr who have been associated with the MCZ since Agassiz’s time have thrust the museum more prominently into the public eye.
“A lot of exemplary work in natural history—like Linnaeus coming up with his binomial system of classification—was most famously done on plants using herbarium specimens,” Woods reflects. “Plants are still important for a lot of the same reasons, but I’ve wondered whether the public recognizes that as much as they recognize big displays in a museum.”
A BLOSSOMING LEGACY
Competition with Agassiz aside, Gray’s impact lives on in the Harvard Summer School and in one of Harvard’s longest-running courses: the more-than-150-year-old “Plants and Human Affairs,” which is today known as Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 59 and is co-taught by Pfister and professor Charles C. Davis.
The course utilizes the herbaria’s resources to bring to life the relationships humans have had with plants for millennia.
Another of Gray’s classes was significant not so much for its content but for the season in which it was taught: Gray taught the first ever Harvard Summer School course in 1871.
Two years earlier, Charles Eliot had become president of Harvard and inaugurated a wave of curricular reforms, from the introduction of electives to the adoption of a departmental system. Under this more flexible framework, summer courses became a possibility, Pfister says.
While the desirability of studying plants in the summer as opposed to frigid Cambridge winters was likely Gray’s impetus, the Summer School marked an important step for female scholars.
“Summer school from the beginning had women,” Pfister notes. “It was really the first big chance for women to use Harvard facilities.”
‘BREATHING LIFE’ INTO OLD SPECIMENS
All of Gray’s collections, and millions of other herbaria specimens, are accessible to botanists today—but the herbaria staff must work constantly to revise and update plant databases, as names and classification systems shift dramatically over time.
“That’s one real way in which our field is distinguished from most of biology,” says Davis, who in addition to his teaching uses the herbaria collections to study plant phylogenies and trace the effect of climate change on various species. “If you go next door and ask what’s valid, five or ten years out ... it’s obsolete.”
But one researcher’s burden is another’s historical treasure trove: from a history of science perspective, old plant labels are ripe for study.
“It’s the most wonderful sequence of working your way through how scientific knowledge really emerges,” Browne says of studying the layers of annotations on various specimens at the herbaria. “You can re-live the process of science.”
Sometimes current research can even be applied to answer the questions asked by scientists of the past, Davis says. For example, his own research has explored questions about plant diversity initially addressed by Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837, and scientists have used plant DNA analysis to illuminate the Japan-America plant connections that so intrigued Gray.
“We’ve started to integrate more cutting-edge molecular approaches, but our field of plant diversity and evolution builds much more so on old literature and old research than a lot of the other hard-core molecular disciplines,” Davis explains. “We’re breathing life into these old collections.”
—Staff writer Julie R. Barzilay can be reached at jbarzilay13@college.harvard.edu.