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Botany
The “herbrarian” of Montréal
The largest university herbarium in Québec—third
largest in Canada —is housed in the facilities of the
Vegetal Biology Research Institute at Université de
Montréal, located at the Montréal Botanical
Garden . Stored in huge rail-mounted cabinets, the 800,000
specimens of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium are the pride of
Stuart Hay, assistant curator who has overseen the operation
of the herbarium for more than 25 years.
Managing a herbarium is no simple task: the curator keeps
very busy looking after loans, computerizing the collection,
and incorporating specimens coming in on exchange, harvest,
or donation. But Stuart Hay still manages to do his own research.
By turning up improperly identified specimens in the herbarium
without having to go anywhere, he discovered ten new species
for Québec and Newfoundland that have led to scientific
publications. Like the Rector himself, the botanist can say
that there is nobody else who performs the same function
as he does at the university! In fact, it is difficult to
imagine a rarer job than Stuart Hay’s, since in Québec,
there are at most five herbarium curators. To explain his
little-known job, the botanist sometimes compares himself
to a librarian. “I am a ‘herbrarian,’ he
jokes, “since a large part of my work involves negotiating
loans of specimens between herbariums; a specimen is like
a book you can consult or borrow.”
Stuart Hay regularly lends specimens to researchers all
around the world who are trying to elucidate the classification
within various groups of plants. He also borrows from other
herbariums. To write a few chapters of La flore du Québec
/ Labrador nordique—an ambitious project to be
published in 2005, which will in a manner of speaking complete
the famous Flore laurentienne of Brother Marie-Victorin—the
researcher had to validate information from more than 2,000
specimens from various herbariums in Canada. “To assemble
all this flora,” the botanist notes, “it would
have been impossible to send a team of botanists to cover
the territory north of the 54 th parallel, including Nunavik
(in Québec) and the Northern Labrador district. It
was far better to take advantage of the mine of information—identification,
harvest date, localization and habitat—to be found
on specimens from herbariums produced by botanists who have
visited this territory, which was hardly known at the time
of Marie-Victorin.” The recognized expert on indigenous
plants and a great outdoorsman, Stuart Hay has also made
some important discoveries in the field, such as Oreopteris
limbosperma, a rare fern which, in Canada , had only
been observed in the Rockies , and which he describes as
his most beautiful botanical discovery. The find, which he
made on a trip to Newfoundland with his colleague André Bouchard,
come on a day on unknown terrain, when the two were waiting
for a thick mist to clear so that a seaplane could come and
pick them up on the high plateau of Gros Morne National Park!
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