University of Arkansas Herbarium

10/02/2026

Teaching Trees to Tomorrow's Teachers! Seniors in Dr. Peggy Ward's Teaching and Funding Outdoor Education class in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas spent a recent afternoon with Jennifer Ogle, UARK Collections Manager, and Jenna Miladin, PhD candidate in the University of Arkansas Department of Biological Sciences, to learn tree identification basics. 🌲After graduation, they will use these botanical tools to help teach their K-12 students plant literacy and appreciation of nature. Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences - University of Arkansas

09/30/2026

Thank you to the 74 people who entered our contest at the Cane Hill Harvest Festival at Historic Cane Hill for a chance to win a copy of Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas! We had 5 winners, all drawn by the wonderful Donna Gwaltney, and announced by Susan Young, who generously donated the 5 copies for our winners!
To our winners, you will receive your book in the mail soon, so you can go forth and botanize! 📖🌿
If you didn't win, don't worry! You can still purchase a book at your local bookstore, outdoor outfitters, or ozarksociety.net.

09/22/2026

We had a really fun time at the Cane Hill Harvest Festival on Saturday! We enjoyed introducing people of all ages to the UARK Herbarium, its history and 100-year-old connection to Cane Hill, & how things work - especially in a fun, hands on way with our printing station! 🌿 And thanks to Susan Young's generosity, we were able to hold a contest to give away 5 copies of Trees, Shrubs, & Woody Vines of Arkansas (more on that soon!).

Many thanks to everyone who helped prepare for the event & who staffed UARK's booth on Saturday - Donna, Anna (who made the amazing fern blocks that were a huge hit!), Frank & Jeff Gwaltney, Susan Young, Jenna Miladin (who helped with setup, loadout, & everything in between), Rachel Savage, Pedro Pezzi, Morgan Russell, Bibiana Ghanim, & Ben Davis. UARK is fortunate to have so much support!

09/16/2026

Save the date! The UARK Herbarium will be tabling this Saturday, the 19th, all day at Historic Cane Hill's Cane Hill Harvest Festival! Make sure to stop by to meet local botanists, discover the history of Cane Hill, enjoy good food, enter our drawing and create beautiful stamp art! We'd also like to give a big thank you to our friend Anna Gwaltney for designing these beautiful handmade linocut stamps! The stamps are of Christmas Ferns, selected for their background at Cane Hill, where they were collected by UARK botanists in the early 1900s. 🌿

09/11/2026

This week, we had Baronger Dowell Bieger and his student Adeline from join us for a tour of the Herbarium! They learned about the mounting process for specimens, specimen storage, and we had a short Q&A about how everything works. (Plus a bonus on traveling fashionably with vasculums that carry specimens!)

09/08/2026

Hi there! My name is Bibiana Ghanim, and I am a junior here at UARK! This is my second semester working in the Herbarium, but my first semester managing social media. I am an Environmental Science major, love all things plants and love to travel! Other projects that I will work on in the Herbarium include refoldering, mounting, digitizing and field collecting. 🌿I'm looking forward to showcasing some of our volunteers and facts/info about the Herbarium this semester!

(Photo credits to Grant Schol for the first image.)

09/04/2026

We had a great time tabling at the UA Museum Campus Open House last month! More than 200 students discovered the university’s natural history collections and other campus resources.🌿At our tables, we demonstrated how to press plants, the parts of an herbarium specimen, what an herbarium is, and showed students where we conduct field work. 🌱

09/01/2026

The herbarium represented at the 2026 Botany conference in Tucson, Arizona this summer. We organized a colloquium on the evolution and ecology of the plant family Orobanchaceae, which serves as a model to understand plant-plant parasitism.

06/01/2026

Jenna Miladin's Sips and Science session last week at Fossil Cove Brewing Co. was a smashing success! She spoke to a packed crowd about her work on the genus Silene and the importance of herbaria in botanical research. Many attendees participated in the interactive plant activity and took a plant specimen home with them at the end of the event. Huge thanks to Jenna for developing and conducting this outreach!

Big thanks also to everyone who attended; Morgan Russell for assisting with the interactive activity; Elizabeth Hays, graduate student in the University of Arkansas Department of Biological Sciences in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, for developing the Sips and Science series; Ben Stratton for emceeing this one; and Fossil Cove for hosting!

05/25/2026

We hope you will join us this Thursday at Fossil Cove Brewing Co. to learn about Jenna's research and the vital role herbaria play in botanical work!

Surprise, a second Sips & Science!

That's right, the month of May is blessing us with a second low-key lecture in the chill atmosphere of the patio tent! Mark your calendar for next Thursday, the 28th!

This time, we'll hear from University of Arkansas PhD student, Jenna Miladin, about the university's herbarium! Researchers at the herbarium document the flora of Arkansas and beyond through the collection, preservation, digitization, and exhibition of botanical specimens.

Grab a b**r and a seat by 7:00 next Thursday and let's learn about plants! 🧠🪻

**r