 |
In the early 1970s, while still a fairly new faculty member,
Jack Rogers was handed the care of Washington State University’s
fungal herbarium, a vast collection of preserved samples of fungi
collected in the Pacific Northwest and around the world.
The collection was initially part of a larger herbarium started
by Charles Vancouver Piper, a well-known botanist and agronomist
who came to work at Washington Agricultural College and School of
Science—later known as State College of Washington—in 1892. In
those early years, Piper traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest,
providing some of the earliest additions to the collection. In 1915
the fungal collection was split off from the main herbarium due to
what Rogers calls “an acrimonious relationship” between plant
pathologist Frederick DeForest Heald and a botanist named Ferman
Pickett.
Heald and his successor, Charles Gardner Shaw, built on the
fungus collections, eventually amassing more than 70,000
specimens.
Rogers inherited stewardship of the collection when Shaw
retired. It was a big responsibility, requiring him to preserve a
record of diversity over time and to provide material that could
help biologists and other scientists identify plant disease. “It
wasn’t a matter of wanting to do this,” says Rogers. "I was told,
‘You do it.’”
One of the main problems with maintaining the herbarium is that
there’s no funding for it, says Rogers. But because of the historic
and scientific value of the collection, he and his colleagues have
kept it working and accessible.
Today the herbarium inhabits a cool, dry room in the basement of
the new Johnson Hall addition. Items in the collection are kept
wrapped loosely in paper and are stored in mushroom-colored,
ceiling-high, compact rolling shelves. Besides Rogers and his
colleague, Lori Carris, who come to drop off new specimens or
retrieve old ones, the only visitors are students working to create
an online database of the large collection. Sharing part of a
$400,000 National Science Foundation grant with WSU’s Ownbey
Herbarium for phanerogamic—i.e., seeding or flowering—plants,
Rogers is able to hire undergraduates to input the data.
The collections of pyrenomycetes—fungi that grow in the
aftermath of fire—and rust, smut, and downy mildew fungi are known
and valued worldwide. “This is the premier collection for the
Inland Empire,” says Rogers. “But we have specimens from around the
world.”
Washington State Magazine Home
|
|
Click here for a photo gallery
highlighting some of the chief contributors to the Mycological
Herbarium collection.
| |
.jpg)
