Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium
Bailey collected numerous specimens and books for his own research. At a time when most herbaria concentrated on wild plants, his specimens represented a unique repository of preserved specimens of cultivated plants. Numbering more than 200,000 when Bailey gave them to Cornell, his specimens were enhanced by notes and photographs to create a permanent record, which Bailey called his “card index of the vegetable world.” The collection included materials Bailey gathered during expeditions in Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, and China, as well as novelties he grew as soon as they were introduced. The Hortorium also contained nearly 3,000 books about wild plants and cultivated plants of every country and an extensive collection of seed and plant catalogs. Bailey regarded the orderly treatment of the names of cultivated plants as his most significant contribution to the plant sciences.
In order to provide continuity for his life’s work, Bailey gave his herbarium and his library to Cornell University in 1935, specifying that it be called the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium, a name he coined for a place for the scientific study of cultivated plants. The Hortorium became a department of the university, with Bailey as its unsalaried director and his daughter, Ethel, as curator. Now a unit of the Department of Plant Biology, the Hortorium today continues its mission to include systematic studies of wild and cultivated plants, ethnobotany, plant molecular systematics, paleobotany of angiosperms, systematics theory, biodiversity studies, and pharmaceutical studies of tropical plants.
It has long been my desire to found an institution to represent the cultivated flora of the world....There is no recognized place in the world for the identification of all cultivated plants as such, with facilities for investigation, covering both herbaceous and woody subjects, and relating the knowledge to the needs of the cultivator and the investigator.
Call it an Hortorium.... A repository for things of the garden—a place for the scientific study of garden plants, their documentation, their classification, and their naming.
Ethel Zoe Bailey
Ethel Zoe Bailey always served as her father's co-worker, accompanying him on numerous collecting expeditions. She played a substantial role in the production of the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture and the Manual of Cultivated Plants. She coauthored Hortus, edited the first eight volumes of Gentes Herbarum, and served as curator of the Hortorium from its inception in 1935 until her retirement in 1957. Subsequently, she voluntarily continued her monumental index to the world’s cultivated plants almost until her death in 1983.
The Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection
The Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection maintained by the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium now includes over 134,000 catalogs from the U.S. and other countries. Started by Liberty Hyde Bailey around 1888, it was curated by Ethel Zoe Bailey from 1911 on. It was named in her honor after her death. An exhibition, “Mail Order Gardens: The Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection,” with a larger selection of catalogs, will be on exhibit in Mann Library until August 31, 2004.