Documented cactus collection donated to The Conservatory

September 2, 2009

The Conservatory was the recent recipient of an extensive wild-collected, documented, collection of cactus species. John Iverson, Professor of Biology at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, donated his entire collection of cactus to the Conservatory of Miami University Hamilton. The collection, consisting of perhaps 100 species, was collected in the wild in Mexico and several Caribbean Islands in the 1970s as Dr. Iverson conducted research on turtles and tortoises, his specialty. 

The plants, imported legally and inspected by USDA inspectors, have been grown by Dr. Iverson in the greenhouse at Earlham College for the past 30 plus years. The size of the collection and the size of individual plants had become too difficult for Dr. Iverson to care for properly at Earlham. Recognizing that The Conservatory has the space, expertise, and workers to care for the collection and to digitize the extensive records that accompanied each plant, Dr. Iverson generously gifted his collection to Miami Hamilton.

In addition to the plants themselves, Dr. Iverson provided several bound reference books on cacti, his field notebook, and several hundred photographic slides of the plants in bloom in their native habitats. An undergraduate student from Oxford, Osian Tam, is completing an independent study project by identifying and labeling all the plants, using the resources provided by Dr. Iverson. Tam expects to have the entire collection ready for display by the end of fall semester.

View more images of the cactus collection at the Miami Hamilton flickr.com website.