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The
Charles T. Mohr Herbarium Internship Fund
at the University of North Carolina Herbarium
Kevin Chuang
2011 Charles T. Mohr Intern
Kevin Chuang, 2011, photo by Brian
Nalley of UNC-CH Biology Department
Kevin Chuang is from Cary, North
Carolina and a senior at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring
in Biology. After taking Dr. Alan
Weakley’s LOCAL FLORA class, he volunteered in the Herbarium throughout his
junior year.
Kevin started in the University of
North Carolina Herbarium as the 2011 Charles T. Mohr Intern in May,
2011. Kevin’s internship duties have
been varied, reflecting the myriad of on-going activities in the Herbarium. For several weeks, Kevin learned his way
around the plant collection by filing the specimens that were catalogued and
imaged for the Plant Identification Center “PIC” website that was developed
in collaboration with the School of Information and Library Science at
UNC-CH. (Click on “PIC Website” on the
left-side bar on this page to learn more.)
Currently Kevin is curating an
extensive set of Hawthorn (Crataegus)
specimens from throughout the Southeastern United States that were collected
and given to the Herbarium by Ron Lance.
Crataegus are a particularly
thorny group of plants, physically as well as taxonomically, and the
specimens that Kevin is mounting, databasing, and
filing in the collection will help botanists understand this challenging
genus. Charles Mohr spent the last
year of his life at the Biltmore Herbarium in Asheville, North Carolina, and
overlapped with Chauncey Beadle, who studied and named many species of Crataegus. “Few genera so widely distributed in the
United States have been so poorly interpreted by American botanists as the
genus Crataegus,” said Beadle. “Crataegus
mohri is distributed from Georgia westward
through upper and central Alabama and Mississippi, and northward to middle
Tennessee… I take pleasure in
associating with this beautiful and most distinct hawthorn, the name of Dr.
Charles Mohr, of Mobile, Alabama.”(1)
In the course of Kevin’s work with Crataegus,
we discovered that University of North Carolina Herbarium has two type
specimens of Crataegus mohrii. Both
were collected by Chauncey Beadle in the woods around Rome, Georgia in
1899. These will be photographed and
included in the Type Specimen Images section of our website. In 2007 Dr. James Phipps of the University
of Western Ontario placed this plant as a variety of Reverchon’s
hawthorn, and gave it the new name Crataegus
reverchonii Sarg. var. mohrii (Beadle) J.B. Phipps. He notes, “In reviewing over 1500
specimens… I have only encountered a few specimens clearly matching the type
description. Likewise I have not
knowingly encountered this variety in the field during over 15 field trips to
the regions so perhaps it is very rare.”(2)
The final phase of Kevin’s
internship will be spent curating specimens that were a gift from the Jesup Herbarium (HNH) of Dartmouth College. The Jesup Herbarium
has transferred all of their specimens from the Southeastern United States to
the University of North Carolina Herbarium (NCU),
about 10,000 specimens total.
The first set of Jesup Herbarium
specimens that Kevin will be processing were collected by Albert Ruth in the Knoxville, Tennessee
area in the 1890’s. Albert Ruth was
the superintendent of school in Knoxville and a very serious botanical collector. The University of Tennessee Herbarium (TENN) in Knoxville
was where he deposited most of his specimens. However, in 1934 Morrill
Hall which housed the Herbarium burned to the ground, and all 50,000
specimens -- including Ruth’s -- were destroyed.(3) Fortunately, TENN rebuilt, and today houses
about 550,000 specimens.
It seems that the Jesup
Herbarium was another recipient of many of Ruth’s botanical specimens, and
those are now being accessioned into NCU’s collection by Kevin. In addition to repairing these old specimens,
Kevin will update the scientific name on each specimen to ensure that it is
filed correctly in our collection. We
look forward to Kevin delving into these historically and botanically
significant specimens and adding them to our collection.
1.
Beadle, C.D. (1899) Studies in Crataegus. Botanical Gazette 28(6): 405-417.
2.
Phipps, J.B. (2007) Miscellaneous typifications, new combinations and one new variety in
North American Crataegus (ROSACEAE). J. Bot. Res. Inst. Texas 1(2): 1005-1010.
3.
White, Peter S. (1981) Looking for Linnaea: the high Smokies
still protect some secrets on their rugged slopes. The Tennessee Conservationist XLVII: 14-16.
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Elizabeth Heston
and granddaughter Hailey Mohr
Heston share the family love for plants.
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Charles Mohr
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On December 18, 2004 Ms. Elizabeth Burch Heston founded and endowed the Charles T. Mohr Herbarium Internship
Fund to be used to support student interns working with mentors at the
University of North Carolina Herbarium in Chapel Hill.
Elizabeth Burch Heston
graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill in 1954. She currently lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with her
husband, John Heston. Her passion is gardening –
the cultivation of daylilies in particular. By establishing this internship,
Ms. Heston is honoring her great-great-grandfather,
botanist Charles Theodore Mohr (1824 – 1901).
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Charles Mohr was one of Alabama’s first botanists. Mohr was granted an
honorary Ph.D. in 1893 by the University of Alabama in recognition of his
contributions to the knowledge of the State’s flora and geology. He is best
known as the author of Plant Life in Alabama, published in 1901.
If you are interested in applying for the
Charles T. Mohr Herbarium Internship, please contact Alan S. Weakley,
Herbarium Curator, at (919) 962-0578 or by email at weakley@unc.edu . Any internship candidate
should demonstrate keen interest in the flora of the southeastern United
States, have good typing skills, and have an interest in learning how to use
and curate herbarium specimens.
To make a contribution to or to obtain more
information about the Charles T. Mohr Internship Fund, please contact
Charlotte Jones-Roe, Assistant Director for Development at the North Carolina
Botanical Garden at (919) 962-9458 or by email at jonesroe@email.unc.edu
Sources:
L. J. Davenport (1988) Charles
Mohr, Botanist. Alabama Heritage 10: 32-45.
Botanical Garden Foundation, Inc. (2004) The Charles T. Mohr Herbarium
Internship Fund Endowment Agreement. North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel
Hill, North Carolina.
C. T. Mohr. Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria.
  
Curriculum North Carolina UNC
In Ecology Botanical Garden Biology Department
University of North Carolina Herbarium
CB# 3280, Coker Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280
phone: (919) 962-6931
fax: (919) 962-6930
email: mccormickATSIGNunc.edu
Last Updated: 17 June 2011
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