The Sherwin Carlquist Collection

The Sherwin Carlquist Collection encapsulates more than 30 years of important botanical research conducted by the late Dr. Sherwin Carlquist, a renowned mid-century American botanist best known for his significant contributions in plant systematics, wood anatomy, and island plant diversity.

The collection is comprised of 191,789 collection objects, i.e., herbarium specimens, wood specimens, plant material preserved in spirits, wood anatomy microscope slides, color slide film, field photograph envelopes affixed with black and white field photographs with field notes, field photograph negative sleeves, and field collection notebooks. The objects in this collection are divided between the California Botanic Garden (RSA) and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) owing to Carlquist’s longstanding professional affiliation with RSA and important collaborations with researchers at BRIT.

This collection has had some curation and digitization, but a significant proportion of the biological collections and the archival objects have never been curated or digitized, which makes the vast majority of this collection currently inaccessible to the broader research community, students, and the general public.

This project is generously funded by the National Science Foundation, award #2133562.