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Pressed for Time: Historic Herbarium Specimens Found at Lehman
Elizabeth Knight Britton in the field, and some of the specimens discovered at Lehman College
September 10, 2025
They say one person's trash is another person's treasure, and this couldn't be truer for a remarkable collection of 140 year-old herbarium specimens rescued from a dumpster in Science Hall.
According to Professor of Biological Sciences Edward Kennelly and the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), the herbarium dates back to the 1880s, and includes plants collected by pioneering botanist Elizabeth Knight Britton, her students, and eminent botanists of the era. At the time, Britton taught at the Normal College of the City of New York, which became Hunter College. She and her husband, botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton, were later instrumental in establishing the Botanical Garden in 1891.
Herbariums consist of plant specimens, often dried, pressed, and affixed to paper.
Last February, Kennelly and two doctoral students were organizing a Science Hall storage room when they happened upon a cart stuffed with bags of paper—these were, in fact, hundreds of botanical specimens.
“When I first saw the specimens in the trash hamper, I thought they were student laboratory projects from decades ago,” said Kennelly. “Only after my student Ella Vardeman looked at them closely, and consulted with her NYBG classmate Lydia Paradiso, did we realize they were of great historic value.”
The specimens eventually found their way to Hunter’s Bronx campus—now Lehman College—not long after it was established in 1931. Flash forward 80 years to 2012: their existence was all but forgotten until Stephen Redenti, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, began moving his Davis Hall lab to facilities in the newly opened Science Hall.
“I came across a pile of discarded equipment and supplies near the subbasement entry of Science Hall,” Redenti recalled. “Among them was a yellow plastic cart on wheels filled with herbarium specimens, remarkably well-made and some dating back more than a century.”
Recognizing their value, he wheeled the delicate artifacts to a nearby storage room for safekeeping—where they remained untouched until Kennelly and the students rediscovered them 12 years later.
Herbarium specimens prior to their transfer to NYBG
After nearly a century on the Lehman campus, the collection was packed up by NYBG botanists in August. On September 26, faculty and administrators will gather to commemorate the handoff to NYBG, where they will be restored, digitized, and incorporated into the Garden’s prestigious Steere Herbarium.
Associate Professor Renuka Sankaran (left) and NYBG colleagues Amy Weiss, Laura Briscoe and Nicole Tarnowsky in the Science Hall parking lot
Lehman College, along with the CUNY Graduate Center have partnered with NYBG for 57 years, enabling plant science faculty and students to further their undergraduate, graduate and doctoral education through access to the NYBG’s labs, resources and experts.
“It is nice to know that Lehman is still at the forefront of botanical science education in New York, carrying forward this long tradition started over one hundred years ago by our colleagues at the Normal College of the City of New York,” Kennelly said.