Flora of North America

Botanical Gardens to feature talk by obsessive plant catalogists

(Oct. 29, 2009) The 150-year-old Missouri Botanical Garden is known for undertaking ambitious and extraordinary projects. It’s the oldest botanical garden in the United States, but it’s also one of the country’s most forward-thinking horticultural institutions. For a few years now it’s been scanning its rare books collection and making every page available at Botanicus.com in a fully-searchable format that includes geotagging, tag clouds and lots of other hip high-tech tools. Scholars used to travel from all over the world to use their collection, but Botanicus allows anyone to page through these rare, valuable, and often quite fragile books from home, coffee and sticky doughnut in hand.

Its Web site— Tropicos.com — makes an extraordinary amount of plant taxonomy information available, along with photographs, illustrations and herbarium specimens, to any plant geek who wants to browse through it. They’ve got over a million plant names in the database, so there’s considerable browsing to do.

James Zarucchi with some rather large leaves from the coccoloba plant. Photo courtesy of James Zarucchi

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And now they’re working on a complete flora of North America. Jim Zarucchi, associate curator at Missouri Botanical Garden and manager of this project, is coming to Humboldt County on Nov. 7 to give a talk at the Humboldt Botanical Gardens Foundation’s annual symposium. Details on that in a minute, but first, a little more about this project.

A “flora” is a book (or a database, or both) that describes all the plant species that occur in a particular region. It doesn’t usually cover only native plants; a flora is meant to be broadly inclusive, describing all the plants that are well-established in the region it covers.

Even weeds. Even naturalized garden plants. Hybrids. Invasives. Whatever. Just — you know — all the plants that grow out there across this great nation of ours.

You’re probably starting to get an idea of what an enormous project this is. The complete Flora of North America will run to 30 volumes, each around 700 pages in length, each costing about $95. They’re halfway through at this point, and Zarucchi has been involved for 13 of the 15 volumes they’ve produced thus far.

“I’m like an orchestra conductor,” he told me over the phone last week. “Up to this point just over 700 people have been involved. We expect it will be well over 1,000 people by the time we’re finished. I’m supposed to know what’s going on with authors, reviewers and editors all over North America.”

The books are being printed in small runs of 2,000 each, and as you can imagine, they’re mostly of interest to libraries and research institutions. “Take a volume like Bryophytes: Mosses, Part 1,” he said. “That one maybe didn’t sell as well. But the volume on orchids was very popular.” About 46,000 copies of the various volumes have been sold so far.

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