The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

Friedrich Vierhapper and the serendipity of Facebook

By Sylvia Orli

For several years, the Department of Botany’s Information Technology team has been reviewing transcriptions of specimen labels returned from the digitization company Picturae and fixing the records that are incorrectly transcribed. Many specimen labels have terrible handwriting. One kind of label consistently puzzled the team. The label is slightly pinkish with a legible taxonomic name, but every other word is written in an unreadable script. Because the team could not read these labels, we imported these records on to the online catalog as “illegible” with the hopes of one day correcting the record. 

I posted examples of these labels in the Facebook page “Herbarium Junkies” with the hopes that crowdsourcing might solve the problem. Herbarium Junkies was created in 2012 by Erika Gardner, Collections Gifts and Exchanges Manager, when she was in graduate school. She made the page as a bit of a joke, dedicated to herbarium devotees like herself, to post funny and interesting items about herbaria. The Facebook group has since ballooned to over 2,000 members, and has a global membership of botanists, herbaria workers, and plant enthusiasts. Group members post confusing labels, interesting herbarium specimens, images of field work, and all sorts of topics related to herbaria.

My illegible label post caught the eye of Clemens Pachschwoll, doctoral student at the University of Vienna, who verified that the label was written in the Kurrentschrift script, a Germanic cursive script popular in pre-WW2 Germany. He also verified that the collector was Friedrich Vierhapper Sr. Vierhapper (1844-1903) and his son, Friedrich Karl Max Vierhapper (1876-1932), were prominent Austrian botanists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Vierhappers specialized in the Flora of Austria and other European countries. Vierhapper Jr. has the genus, Vierhapperia, named after him. Clemens put me in touch with Michael Hohla of Austria, who specializes in the Flora of the Innviertel (the western part of Upper Austria). Amazingly, he and his colleagues had published a monograph of the Vierhappers, “Father and son Vierhapper – two lives dedicated to Botany” in 2019 (Stapfia 110: 1-202; https://www.zobodat.at/publikation_volumes.php?id=61962), and Hohla was delighted to see these inscrutable labels.

I scoured the herbarium catalog for more of these herbarium specimen images to send to him for translation and transcription. He asked an important question – why does the US Herbarium have so many specimens from Vierhapper? Who might have sent them? Although specimen exchange was common between the USNH and Austria, these specimens appeared to come in a shipment. I checked the specimen catalog and indeed, all Vierhapper specimens came from the same sheet number sequences.

To date, the team has found more than 176 Vierhapper specimens, and will almost certainly find more as the digitization conveyor continues to chug through the collection. Being unable to return to the US Herbarium because of Covid 19 restrictions, we cannot look in the herbarium ledgers to see who might have sent these Vierhapper specimens, but we will be very interested to investigate once we return. We welcome any insight on this herbarium exchange. Please send your comments to orlis@si.edu and be sure to join the Herbarium Junkies Facebook group.