While it might not look like it at first glance the Herbarium at Troy University is home to thousands upon thousands of plants, plants that are preserved and stored for study and research.

“The Herbarium consists of about specimens of both vascular and non-vascular plants,” says Biology Professor Dr. Alvin Diamond. “Vascular plants are the typical plants that people think of and non-vascular plants are things like mosses and liverworts and lichens and they are preserved identified and labeled and stored here in the collection.”

The plants in the Herbarium are stored in newly added large moving compactors which have allowed for more plants to be added to the facility as well as more effective organization.

“We recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation which has allowed us to purchase these compactors which has basically doubled the space that we have available for our specimens in the same amount of actual physical space that we already had,” says Diamond.

While new species are being discovered and cataloged every day one might be surprised to hear how old some of the plants in the facility actually are.

“We have plants here that were collected in the 1890s and 1880s and they’re from there all the way up to today,” says Diamond.

For the full story watch Caroline’s report.