Cyrus Pringle

The collections of our namesake, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle (1838-1911), a self-taught plant breeder and botanist with 1,200 type specimens to his name, form the foundation of our herbarium. Pringle exchanged over 500,000 sheets with two dozen herbaria around the world, bringing in a geographically and taxonomically diverse representation of the world’s flora. His rich offerings, many from pioneering expeditions in Mexico, Central America, and the southwestern United States, led exchange partners to send unusually choice specimens. Notably, the Berlin-Dahlem herbarium, later destroyed in World War II, sent specimens from Friedrich Sellow, one of the first European naturalists to explore Brazil. The Pringle Herbarium holds the largest collection of Vermont flora in the world. Vermont’s climatic and edaphic diversity has drawn botanists for two centuries, and we house all of the major collections from the state, including the early herbaria of Frances and Adelia Penniman (ca. 1815), Charles Frost (1840s-’50s), and Joseph Torrey, former president of UVM (1840s). Now, the Pringle’s collections—fully imaged as of 2018—represent a broad cross-section of the North American flora and hail from every continent except Antarctica. The Pringle Herbarium Library holds general botany titles and flora for vascular plants and bryophytes of the world, with an emphasis on the Americas. The nucleus of the library is the plant systematics collection, donated by the estate of pteridologist Hugh Churchill. The herbarium's archives chronicle 200 years of New England botanical history through correspondence, photographs, and field notebooks. Of particular value are the papers of Cyrus Pringle, including his daily field journals, and archival materials of the Vermont Bird and Botanical Club. Loans of specimens are available to established herbaria for study by their staff, associated professionals and students. Returned loans must be annotated unless a specific explanation is provided to the curator. Contact [email protected] to request a loan. Destructive sampling of Pringle specimens is possible with written request to our curator, Wes Testo, including a justification for the sampling and an indication of the likelihood that the results of the sampling (ordinarily molecular-genetic information) will reach the scientific community via a publication or a common portal such as Genbank. The returned specimens need to be annotated with the nature of the material removed and, if possible, the relevant publication. The herbarium honored 95-year-old Hilda White with a holly fern that will carry her name forever.