First entry.

The New York Botanical Garden is lush and green, with willow trees pouring into the walkway and sycamores filtering the light green. The herbarium, where I work, is entirely harmonious with the outside, beautiful, simple and perfectly functional.

I have spent the first week of my internship working on the first floor of the five-floor herbarium. The Borreria and Inga genera have undergone a long debated separation and renaming. I work relabeling specimens, some collected as early as 1821, and sorting them into new groupings.   Three days into the Odyssey-like journey of sorting the Borreria genus, I discovered an entirely separate stack of specimens, who, although labeled with their new names, had not been collated with the rest of their genus.   I spent the last two days of my first week on the third floor of the herbarium organizing a new collection of the Inga genus. In the upcoming weeks I hope to begin mounting specimens myself and to attend weekly lectures hosted on-site. I also hope to begin filing specimens so that I may gain greater understanding of the herbarium as a whole.

I am pictured in the first floor herbarium relabeling a species of the Borreria genus. I am wearing a fleece to protect against the refrigerated temperatures necessary to preserve the specimens.

The image on the right is of one of the Borreria specimens with which I worked during my first week at the herbarium. I found this specimen to be particularly important because it is nearly two centuries old and has been carefully repaired multiple times, showing a human understanding in the worth of science, beauty, and the continued communication of knowledge.