Twice a week for the past three decades, Hilda White has spent hours carefully preserving plant specimens at the University of Vermont’s Pringle Herbarium, which houses a massive collection from around the world.
White, 95, started volunteering at the herbarium after she retired from her job as a chemistry lab technician. While taking a class in planet systematics at UVM, she learned that the herbarium needed help mounting plants.
Twenty-eight years later, White is still helping. She works 10 hours a week, gluing dried plants collected by researchers to special pieces of paper so they can be added to the herbarium’s collection.
White estimates she’s mounted more than 50,000 plants.
“It's something useful to do,” White said on a recent morning during a break from her work. “It gives me an artistic outlet. I like to mount them so that they look nice, and it's just a sense of satisfaction of doing something useful that's going to last.”
And now, White herself will, in a way, be preserved in the collection. A newly discovered species of Christmas fern has been named in her honor.
Weston Testo, the herbarium’s director discovered the fern two years ago during a research trip just outside of Cali, Colombia. Testo was walking through a national park when he spotted an unusual plant.
“I saw this spectacular fern — [a] big showy plant, kind of this bright, shiny grain,” Testo said. “I knew from 30 feet away that it was something at least I'd never seen before.”
Testo and his colleagues took samples of the fern and began studying it. When they realized it was a species “unknown to science,” Testo said naming the fern after White was an obvious decision.
“I couldn't think of someone who had contributed more to our collection here in the last decades than Hilda,” Testo said. “She's an institution here.
Researchers surprised White with the newly named fern — Polystichum hildae — as a birthday gift on her 95th birthday this year. White was floored.
“I could hardly speak, and then I cried all afternoon,” she said. “It's splendid. It's nice and big and healthy, and it's going to be here forever. So what more can I say?”
