Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of Indefensiveplants.com.

What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How's everyone doing this week?

Do not forget that we still have a ton of awesome designs added to our Teespring store.

Just head on over to Tyspring.com slash stores slash indefensive plants and check out all of the great customizable designs we have over

there. They're great for the plant lover in your life. Or if you are the plant lover, treat yourself

and know that a portion of your purchase is being donated to places like the Rainforest Trust,

the Nature Conservancy, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. But today I've got something

really interesting for you. I welcome

Barbara Tears to the podcast to talk about her new book, Herbarium, The Quest to Preserve and

classify the World's Plants. Dr. Tears is the director of the William and Linda Steerer

Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. And aside from loving curatorial work,

she also studies liverworts. So she joins us today to talk about all of the research and

interest that went into writing this incredibly beautiful book. I cannot emphasize how beautiful

this book is because it shows how amazingly artistic the science of herbarium collections really

can be.

This book takes a deep dive into the history, the present, and the future of these amazing scientific collections, and she's tackling a lot of really interesting and important

ideas along the way.

What always mazes me about herbaria is just how useful they can be.

These are data gold mines.

And as technologies and our understanding of the

world advances, there's no telling what use they're going to have into the future. So this is a

really timely book, and I think this is something everyone listening will enjoy. So let's just get

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