Noted Botanical Collection May Lose Its Home

One bottle contains parts of an orchid from pre-revolutionary Cuba, another a lily from some threatened corner of the African rain forest, a third the bark of trees ripped out of the ground 50 years ago when a hurricane slammed into Rhode Island.

There are 6,000 such specimens of plant life, each held in a short-necked bottle topped with a fat cork covered in plastic and tied with a string. The collection was painstakingly gathered and preserved over six decades, but it is now largely forgotten and its future is uncertain at its home in a UC Santa Barbara science building.

The collection was the lifework of two of this century’s leading experts in plant structure, former UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Vernon I. Cheadle and his longtime collaborator, Katherine Esau, both now dead.

It has been said that the collection represents a lost era of botany, a time when Indiana Jones-type scientists battled insects and hardships on long field expeditions. Its boosters also say it is one of the best in the country, with specimens that can help research in such varied fields as plant evolution, genetic engineering and pesticide absorption.

“It is an invaluable collection,” said Ray F. Evert, past chairman of the botany department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It would absolutely be a terrible loss if anything were to happen to it. It would cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to duplicate this.”

However, despite its historical and scientific significance, off-campus researchers rarely use the Cheadle-Esau collection, partly because the bottles and the 54,000 microscope slides are not indexed and the preservation methods are so antiquated.

UCSB professors fear that the collection could decay unless funding is obtained to solve those problems. They were disappointed when their request for a $270,000 grant recently was denied by the National Science Foundation despite strong recommendations from other scientists. Now the professors hope to reapply and look for other funding to supplement the very modest income the collection receives from a special endowment.

Jennifer A. Thorsch, a UCSB botany professor who was Esau’s last graduate student, said the collection might even lose its home at UCSB if research use does not increase. The collection receives only about 10 requests a year for information from off campus, she said.

“If we don’t do something with it, it’s just taking up space at the university that could be used for something else,” Thorsch said. “That is always a threat. The university is supportive, but if the collection doesn’t get funds and isn’t used, eventually it could be thrown out.”

Thorsch has to constantly refill the old-fashioned bottles because they leak in storage drawers and the preservatives easily evaporate. She said federal funds would have allowed for the purchase of evaporation-resistant jars. Researchers said the funds would also have allowed them to create a computerized index and to take digital photos of microscope slides for the Internet. Currently, without an index, finding anything can take days.

“None of it is linked in such a way that you can walk in and say I want this family of plants and everything you have in this family,” Thorsch said.

The collection relies on $500 annual income from a $10,000 endowment and free space from the university in a 10-foot-by-36-foot room of drawers and shelves on a second floor. UCSB has pledged some matching funds if the federal money comes through.

One anonymous reviewer for the National Science Foundation wrote that saving the collection was vital because “these records contain a lifetime of . . . brilliance.” But the proposal lost out in the highly competitive judging in which only 7% of requests are approved.

Evert likened the collection’s current condition to “having a library without an index.” Evert was a protegee of Esau’s at UC Davis and, when given the opportunity to name his own professorship at Wisconsin, he named it after Esau.

Since Esau’s and Cheadle’s heyday, botany increasingly has become an indoor laboratory science as researchers look at DNA and molecular structure. For that reason, scientists say the collection is especially important for its fieldwork.

“The irony is that while we are finally appreciating biological diversity, we aren’t training people to go out and find it anymore,” said Susan Mazer, a UCSB botany professor. “We just don’t get people trained on how to identify a broad range of plants in the field. It’s not as if anybody is repeating the work of Cheadle and Esau.”

Esau, who died in 1997, wrote what is considered a definitive textbook on plant anatomy. She was awarded a National Medal of Science from President Bush in 1989.

Cheadle, who died in 1995, may be best known for his tenure as chancellor at UCSB from 1962 to 1977, but his first love was botany. He collected in remote corners of Africa, Australia and Cuba.

Cheadle and Esau first collaborated in the 1940s at UC Davis, and she followed him to the Santa Barbara campus. While Cheadle did most of the international collecting, Esau worked on many of the slides and collected herself. Their relationship was always formal and professional, colleagues recall.

“He always called her Miss Esau, and she always called him Dr. Cheadle,” Thorsch said. “They never used each other’s first name.”

UCSB researcher John Damuth said the collection compares well to ones at the Smithsonian and the largest botanical gardens across the country. He predicted that posting the photos of the many specimens on the Internet will prove highly valuable worldwide.

“The ability to use this even for high school science teachers would be unbelievable,” Damuth said.

“People throughout the world don’t even know that this collection exists,” he added. “The historical depth of the collection is so important because so many habitats have been altered or simply disappeared.”