About
The TEX and LL herbaria contain over 1,000,000 total specimens and are among the largest herbaria in the southwestern United States. The facility ranks 13th in size across the nation. About a quarter of the specimens were collected in Texas, the largest holdings of Texas plants in the world. Nearly half of the specimens are from Latin America, with an especially strong representation from Mexico and northern Central America. Presently the number of new specimens accessioned into the Plant Resources Center’s herbaria is growing at an approximate rate of 7,000 per year.
History
The origins of the Plant Resources Center date back to the about 1890, when UT's first biology instructor, Frederick W. Simonds donated his plant collections. Over the years, collections from other collaborators including professor William L. Bray, Dr. Mary Sophie Young, Marshal Johnston, and Billie Turner, substantially increased the number of specimens. It was in the late 1980's when the transfer of Dr. Cyrus L. Lundell's private collection brought up the collection close to the million of specimens, positioning the Plant Resources Center as one of the biggest plant collections in the Southwest United States. Go here for a detailed history of the Plant Resources Center.
Composition
The herbarium collection at UT contains many unique collections that are represented only here, or in very few other herbaria. Complete or nearly complete sets include the collections of Cyrus L. and Amelia Lundell, Marshall C. Johnston, James Henrickson, Robert Runyon, Elias Contreras, Percy H. Gentle, Eizi Matuda, and Billie L. Turner. The Plant Resources Center also has significant holdings of Donovan S. Correll, Sydney F. Blake, George B. Hinton and son, Harold N. Moldenke, Cornelius H. Muller, William A. Silvius, and Ivan M. Johnston, as well as significant holdings of Cyrus G. Pringle, Rogers McVaugh, and numerous other well-known plant collectors. Over 8,000 taxa are represented in the Type Collection.
Taxonomic concentration
The collection excels in holdings of the large plant family Asteraceae (sunflower family) from around the world, with more than 200,000 sheets. This large concentration of composites is partly due to the acquisition of the S. F. Blake collection of Asteraceae by the Lundell Herbarium. This large private collection was assembled by one of the foremost Asteraceae workers of the 20th century. Because of his willingness to identify Asteraceae from throughout the world, Blake amassed not only a large collection, but a very diverse one, both systematically and geographically.
The Blake collection is intercalated with the very large TEX collection of global Asteraceae assembled by the 60 or more monographers (most students and faculty at UT, especially B. L. Turner and his students, as well as J. Panero) who have worked in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico over the last 40 years. Comparatively few of these collections have been widely distributed among other U.S. institutions.
Because of the research interests of the staff and graduate students, especially comprehensive collections have been, or are being, accumulated for the plant families Chloranthaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Fabaceae, Fagaceae, Krameriaceae, Lamiaceae, Polygalaceae and Rhamnaceae. Also strongly represented are the Boraginaceae, Poaceae, and Scrophulariaceae.
In the late 1980s, the acquisition of the Lundell herbarium (LL) added ca. 315,000 specimens to the Plant Resources Center’s collections. These were accumulated throughout his career by the well-known botanist and archaeologist, Cyrus L. Lundell, who collected many specimens and also acquired the personal herbaria of several other botanists. With this acquisition, the Plant Resources Center became a major resource for material of the angiosperm families Celastraceae, Eriocaulaceae, Myrsinaceae, Sapotaceae and Verbenaceae..
Location
The Plant Resources Center is located in the Main Building (aka. the Tower) on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin. Our main entrance is Room 127, located on the east hallway on the first floor (one up from ground). The collections are housed on eight floors within the building complex.
Access and Use
The herbarium is open for general use 8:30 A.M.-noon. and 1:00-5:00 P.M., Monday through Friday. Visitors wishing to use the collection for research or plant identifications are welcome; appointments are preferred but not required (see visitor policy below). We encourage the use of our collections by both professional scientists and amateur plant enthusiasts and welcome faculty teachers, students, master naturalists and anyone else with an interest in collections-based botany or museum management. Visitors coming from off-campus by car should also request information on parking. Scientists wishing to consult the collections for extended periods may be furnished research space upon formal request to the Director or the Curator outlining their research objectives and funding sources. Scientists wishing to use material for studies that include sampling of specimens should consult our policy on the use of our collection for such studies.
Visitor Policy
The Plant Resources Center of the University of Texas is a scientific resource collection composed of the University of Texas Herbarium, the Lundell Herbarium, and associated reprint collections and facilities. The core of this institute is the collection of over 1,000,000 pressed, dried, preserved plant specimens from all parts of the globe, including the best herbarium collection of Texas plants anywhere, and one of the finest collections of Mexican plants in the United States. Some specimens are over 150 years old, including early Texas collections, although most are from the 20th Century.
The Plant Resources Center is a basic resource for research and education in plant classification and ecology. Our responsibility and challenge is to make the collection as useful as possible to those who need to use and consult it while maintaining its scientific value undiminished and even enhanced for future users. Unlike a library, every single specimen in an herbarium is irreplaceable.
The Plant Resources Center is an important public resource, and visitors are welcome. However, because of our responsibility to protect the specimens for future users, firsttime visitors who wish to consult the herbarium must first make an appointment with the Curator, who will give them a thorough introduction to the organization of the collection, the correct handling of specimens, and other basics of standard herbarium practice. Non-scientists will need to demonstrate a valid need to use the collection. Tours can also be arranged through the Curator.
For more information, please contact: Dr. George Yatskievych, Curator, 127D Main Building, (512) 471-5904
Search Database
Some content for the herbaria has not yet been migrated to this website. For legacy content, click here.
Faculty and Staff
Graduate Students
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Whitney Behr
Fowler Lab
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Todd Farmer
Jansen Lab
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Keri Greib
Sedio Lab
Escobar Award 2021
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Sarah Hunter
Jansen Lab
Herbarium Summer Fellow 2021
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Fiona MacNeil
Sedio Lab
Escobar Award 2021
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Alison Northup
Keitt Lab
Escobar Award 2021
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Lydia Tressel
Jansen Lab
Escobar Award 2021
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Curatorial Support
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Elena Castelo-Patterson
Senior Herbarium Assistant
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Tomislav Urban
Programmer
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Zachary Johnson
Consultant
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Annette Avila
Herbarium Assistant
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Zhiyao Bao
Herbarium Assistant
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Sofia Bautista
Herbarium Assistant
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Jason Canning
Herbarium Assistant
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Mateo Cordova
Herbarium Assistant
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Jake Doyle
Herbarium Assistant
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Aidan Engstrom
Herbarium Assistant
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Adriana Glick
Herbarium Assistant
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Elizabeth Guajardo
Herbarium Assistant
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Phong Le
Herbarium Assistant
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Adrienne Li
Herbarium Assistant
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Elena Loi
Herbarium Assistant
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Brian Matibag
Herbarium Assistant
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Erica McCarty
Herbarium Assistant
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Elijah McGinley
Herbarium Assistant
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Stephanie Nunez
Herbarium Assistant
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Barbara Ovalles
Herbarium Assistant
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Veronica Park
Herbarium Assistant
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Yining Qian
Herbarium Assistant
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Ethan Schommer
Herbarium Assistant
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Tushar Sharma
Herbarium Assistant
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Dylan Sheng
Herbarium Assistant
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Arely Torres
Herbarium Assistant
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Mandy Tran
Herbarium Assistant
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Johari Weaver
Herbarium Assistant
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Wenxuan Zhou
Herbarium Assistant
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Joyce Cheng
Volunteer
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Vicki Wold
Volunteer
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Alicia Zubay
Volunteer
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Erick Zubay
Volunteer
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Henry Adamson
Volunteer
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Stacie Skwarcan
Volunteer
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Suzanne Labry
Volunteer
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Announcements
13 December 2021 - The Plant Resources Center is closing for the holidays after Tuesday, December 21st. We will re-open to the public on Monday, January 3rd, 2022. During this time, the entire university shuts down for winter break. If you have a particular need to access the herbarium during the break, please contact our Director, Bob Jansen at (512) 921-0136. We wish you a safe and happy holidays from everyone at the BLTPRC.
8 December 2020 - The Plant Resources Center is closing for the holidays after Friday, December 18th. We will re-open to the public on Monday, January 4th, 2021. During this time, the entire university shuts down for winter break. We wish you a safe and happy holidays from everyone at the BLTPRC!
27 May 2020 - We regretfully announce the passing of our Director Emeritus, Billie L. Turner at the age of 95.
Born in 1925 in Texas, Dr. Turner found a career with plants under the tutelage of famed Texas botanist, BartonWarnock, and later studied under Lloyd Shinners and Marion Ownbey for his graduate degrees. After 
joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1953, he became director of the University of Texas Herbarium in 1957, a position he held until his official retirement in 2000. Even in retirement, Bille came into the office daily to continue his research until late 2016, when balance and mobility issues forced him into full retirement. Unfortunately, he recently contracted COVID-19 at the nursing home in Austin where he resided. Given his advanced age and physical decline, it is perhaps not surprising that he was unable to recover. He died peacefully in the early morning hours on Wednesday, May 27th.
Some of Billie’s early research involved the legumes of Texas and he retained a fascination for this group throughout his career. His three generic treatments in the upcoming Fabaceae volume in the Flora of North America series may be the last of his more than 300 publications. He had a number of other “pet groups” especially some of the larger New World genera of mints, but he will be best remembered professionally for his interest in the sunflower family. Billie was an authority on systematics of the Asteraceae and was especially interested in the species inhabiting Mexico. He published an extensive (but sadly unfinished) series of fascicles of the “Comps of Mexico” in the Phytologia Memoirs series. Throughout his career, groups with taxonomic diversity in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico were a major focus. Billie also had a strong interest in cytological evolution and chemosystematics, and he was an early proponent of molecular approaches to systematics, although he was first and foremost an herbarium taxonomist. Billie received the Asa Gray award from ASPT in 1991 in recognition of his storied career.
Billie was a hands-on director. Early on, he renovated the collection, and he stimulated a large number of botanists to donate new specimens documenting their research and exploration. The facility’s name was officially changed to the Plant Resources Center in 1976. In recognition of Billie’s many contributions to the institution, in 2017 the University’s Board of Regents voted to formally rename the Center in his honor. One of the achievements that Dr. Turner found most satisfying was the acquisition of the Lundell Herbarium when Cyrus Lundell retired and shut down the Texas research Foundation. For several years in the 1980s, Billie wooed Dr. Lundell, who eventually donated his collection of some 320,000 sheets to the University of Texas. Billie was tireless in searching for a home on the UT campus to house the volume and weight of the expanded herbarium, which at that time was already approaching a million total specimens. In the late 1980s, all of the holdings were consolidated in the iconic UT Tower, where they are still kept today. The Lundell herbarium not only added great historical depth to the collection, but also included important personal collections amassed by other botanists, such as Harold Moldenke and Sidney F. Blake. Billie was especially prescient in convincing the Lundell family to donate funds for a series of endowments, which were the herbarium’s saving grace when the College decided to withdraw its annual financial contribution in 2016.
Billie will also be remembered as an outstanding teacher. During his career, scores of students completed graduate degrees at UT under his mentorship, most of whom went on to successful careers in botany. Billie was also a key figure in the building of the Plant Sciences program at the university, which developed an amazing faculty that included such names as Mabry, Bold, and Alexopoulus, among others. He was also instrumental in the hiring of the botanist who would succeed him as herbarium director, Beryl Simpson.
Aside from his professional accomplishments, Billie will be remembered as a larger-than-life personality, an unconventional extrovert who seemingly delighted in shocking those around him with surprising and often ribald comments. He was alsoa generous man and a hopeless romantic, a poet among botanists. He was a true intellectual with a broad fascination with life, including human societal evolution. However, to those associated with the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center he will remain a source of inspiration and a dear friend.
Those who knew Billie well may wish to contact Bob Adams, who is planning to publish a special issue of Phytologia (a journal that Billie rescued when its originator, Harold Moldenke, decided to retire) honoring Billie and is seeking tributes and anecdotes from friends. Any donations made to the Plant Resources Center at UT in Billie's memory will be placed in a fund to support a summer graduate student fellowship in the herbarium.
24 March 2020 - With a heavy heart, we announce that the Plant Resources Center will be closed starting Wednesday, 25 March due to COVID-19 precautions. Stay tuned for more information about reopening. Stay safe everyone!
16 December 2019 - The Plant Resources Center is closing for the holidays after Friday, 20 December. We will re-open to the public on 6 January 2020. During this time, the entire university shuts down for winter break. Happy holidays from everyone at the BLTPRC!
1 September 2019 - The Texas and Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria 
(TORCH) was founded in 2006 to advocate for and to organize herbaria in the states of Texas and Oklahoma. TORCH provides a forum for communication and collaboration among regional herbaria of all types and sizes; promotes regional data sharing for collections-based research, outreach, and education; and can assist herbaria with infrastructure and management issues.
Last year, the majority of the TORCH member herbaria collaborated on a proposal to the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC). The intention was to accomplish the digitization of about 2.2 million specimens distributed among 46 member herbaria and to thus to mobilize data and images of use to researchers, students, citizen scientists, conservationists, land managers, and others for a large variety of projects. The digitization process involves creation of high-resolution digital images of specimens, transcription of information from specimen labels into institutional databases, addition of geographic coordinates where possible, and dissemination of the data through searchable online portals.
The Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center is pleased to announce that our proposal was successful! The National Science Foundation recently awarded us a new grant for approximately $817,000 over four years to complete the digitization of more than 500,000 herbarium specimens collected in the states of Texas and Oklahoma and housed in our herbaria, as well as those of 10 partner institutions. This is our part of a much larger collaborative grant totaling nearly $4,700,000 and involving 46 herbaria from across the two states and elsewhere. The lead institutions on this grant are the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, UT-Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State University. Each of these lead herbaria works with a series of other institutions to accomplish the overall project.
In addition to digitization, project goals include 1) involving members of plant enthusiast organizations (such as native plant and naturalist societies); 2) contributing to a globally competitive STEM workforce through workshops and lectures for technicians and undergraduate interns; 3) developing and implementing innovative strategies to increase the efficiency of the digitization process, among other themes.
In early October, assistant curator, Amber Horning, will be traveling to Gainesville, Florida, for a workshop hosted at the Florida Museum of Natural History by the iDigBio Program. iDigBio is the national hub for the ADBC program’s activities and acts as an online aggregator of data and images from all of the natural history collections funded through collaborative grants under this NSF program. Thus far, the iDigBio website hosts more than 122 million total natural history object records, of which more than 48 million represent herbarium specimens. The workshop is designed to allow existing consortia to share their experiences and for new ones to learn from these experiences.
05 August 2019 - This week, the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center is pleased to welcome our new 
Assistant Curator, Amber Horning! Amber comes to us from the University of Mississippi, where she recently completed her Master’s degree with advisor Dr. Jason D. Hoeksema. Her thesis research involved: An experimental test of controls on resource exchange in an ectomycorrhizal symbiosis.
During her time at Ole Miss, Amber spent two years as the assistant curator in the Pullen Herbarium, including one semester running the herbarium by herself when the curator, Dr. Lucile McCoook was traveling in Australia. Her experience is excellent with all aspects of managing a herbarium collection. The Pullen Herbarium is also a leading member of the Magnolia grandiFLORA Digital Herbarium for Mississippi project, and Amber was involved in all aspects of the databasing, imaging, and georeferencing of specimens for this aggregated online portal.
Early in her career, Amber also spent three years as a Lab Manager and Research Technician in Dr. Christopher Blackwood’s lab at Kent State University after completing her Bachelor’s Degree there magna cum laude in 2012.
Amber was selected from a large pool of well-qualified applicants for our open position, based on her broad experience and outgoing personality, as well as glowing testimonials from her enthusiastic supporters. She will be a great asset for the Plant Resources Center! If you are visiting the UT Tower, please feel free to stop by our office in Room 127 and welcome her.
Lundellia
Lundellia is the annual journal of botanical systematics published by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center of The University of Texas at Austin. Beginning with volume 21 (2018), Lundellia has become fully electronic, served by BioOne as an Open Access Journal. For information on submitting manuscripts for potential publication in future volumes of Lundellia, please contact editor Dr. Jose L. Panero at: panero@utexas.edu
Submissions to Lundellia are due by July 1st annually.
Full contents
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Volume 22, December 2019.
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Volume 23, December 2020.
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Lundellia 24, December 2021
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Volume 19, December 2016.
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Volume 20, December 2017.
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Volume 21, December 2018.
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Volume 16, December 2013.
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Volume 17, December 2014.
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Volume 18, December 2015.
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Volume 13, December 2010.
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Volume 14, December 2011.
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Volume 15, December 2012.
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Volume 10, December 2007.
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Volume 11, December 2008.
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Volume 12, December 2009.
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Volume 7, December 2004.
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Volume 8, December 2005.
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Volume 9, December 2006.
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Volume 4, December 2001.
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Volume 5, December 2002.
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Volume 6, December 2003.
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Volume 1, May 1998.
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Volume 2, December 1999.
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Volume 3, December 2000.
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Search the collection
The TORCH Portal: Plant specimen data and images
The Plant Resources Center of the University of Texas at Austin houses the University of Texas (TEX) and
Lundell (LL) herbaria, which combined comprise over a million specimens.
These databases presently include over 515,000 specimens from both
herbaria, using the Symbiota interface and software. Search our collection here.
Images of plant speciments from Travis County
The images presented here may be freely used for non-commercial purposes.
Copyright for all images is held by the PlantResources Center of the University
of Texas at Austin. Commercial use of any images, or publication of more than five images
under any circumstances, requires permission from the Plant Resources Center.
Browse by families: A to L, M to Z.
Browse by genus: A to B, C, D to G, H to M, N to R, S to Z.
Type Database Images
The databse of TEX and LL types is directly available through the JSTOR Plants Website.
Users who cannot get the needed images through the JSTOR website should
contact the curator.
The Comps of Mexico: A systematic account of the family Asteraceae
Browse high-resolution images here.
Projects
The photographs of Texas wildflowers you see on these pages were taken by Anella and Laurence Dexter throughout Texas between 1951 and 1981 and are part of a larger collection presented to the Plant Resources Center by Laurence Dexter in 2000. Of the total collection of 591 flowering plant photographs, 217 have been scanned from the original 35mm slides.
This virtual herbarium is a collaborative project of Joanne Birch, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Plant Resources Center. It harbors representatives of medicinal plants from Texas and Missisippi that are housed in the Gideon Lincecum Collection (1821-1933).
Field-based descriptions of the native and naturalized plant species of Williamson county, by Dr. Arthur Gibson.
