Stepping into the UNC-Chapel Hill Herbarium feels similar to entering a witch's lair. There's no bubbling cauldrons, but jars of dried plants and vials of extracted oils line a glass cabinet near the entryway. A hodgepodge of yellowed pages and handwritten notes cover nearly every flat surface. Fittingly, there's a lot of green: olive-hued filing drawers, seemingly endless rows of slate-green cabinets, a mint-colored staircase along a sage green wall.
Curatrix Carol Ann McCormick sits (in a green sweater, of course) at a wooden desk piled high with dried plants sourced everywhere from Guam to Korea. Researchers sent the samples to join the herbarium's catalogue of over 800,000 specimens, and McCormick ensures they're properly labelled, sequenced, and stored within the botanical library.
A recent announcement made McCormick freeze in both excitement and trepidation: The herbarium's already-massive collection will soon double in size. UNC and Duke University announced Monday that the two institutions will merge their respective herbaria under the North Carolina Botanical Garden, which already oversees UNC's collection. Once combined, the collection will be the third-largest university herbarium in the United States and the largest in the Southeast.
The consolidation comes two years after Duke announced its plan to shut down its herbarium — a decision that resulted in outcry from scientists across the nation. Duke cited a need to relocate the collection due to outdated facilities, but instead of dividing up specimens, everything will now be brought to Chapel Hill.
"It speaks volumes that UNC found the vision and resources to rescue an irreplaceable biodiversity collection that Duke spent a century building and then chose not to keep," said Kathleen Pryer, who served as the director of Duke's Herbarium until her 2025 retirement. "Refusing to fund it, then handing it off, isn't stewardship — it's dereliction."
McCormick, who has worked at UNC's herbarium for 26 years, said the broader herbaria research community wanted Duke's collection to remain functional on its campus, but since Duke deemed that wasn't possible, the herbaria staff at the two institutions must collaborate to maintain the collections.
"If it was me, I'd be pissed as hell, right? Worried, relieved — it's a whole range of emotions. And I'm feeling all those things now, but from the other side," McCormick said.
The challenge of moving Duke's massive botanical collection
This isn't the first time UNC has welcomed another university's herbaria materials; McCormick recalls taking in North Carolina A&T University's herbarium collection after its curator's sudden death this past April and picking up specimens from St. Andrews University after its closure last May. But Duke's collection is much larger.
Housing the specimen was the first concern on McCormick's mind when she heard the consolidation was finalized. UNC's herbarium currently covers the fourth floor of Coker Hall, and the space is already overflowing with organic material.
Duke's collection of over 825,000 specimens — including lichen, fungi and vascular plants — will be housed in the former Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center in Chapel Hill by 2027. UNC plans to build a larger Plant Biodiversity Research Center to better fit both collections, which account for a total of about 1.7 million specimens.
NC Botanical Garden Director Damon Waitt said the research center is in the fundraising stage. He hopes to raise $100 million toward the facility and believes the necessary funds will be secured in the next two years.
"These collections take up a huge amount of space, and there aren't just lots of empty buildings floating around on either campus that can accommodate a collection of that size," he said.
A magnet for plant scientists
Waitt said researchers use the herbarium in various ways. The botanical garden's conservation ecologists collect and log rare plant specimens. State agencies conduct vegetation surveys. On the university level, faculty pursue a variety of research projects with the physical specimen and their DNA sequences.
Duke's herbarium, Waitt said, has an excellent variety of mosses and lichens, while UNC is especially strong in vascular plants. Together, the combined herbaria will become a national hub for plant biodiversity research.
"I think it's going to act like a magnet for researchers from both local universities and universities beyond North Carolina to study the flora of the southeastern United States, because it will be the best collection of plant biodiversity in the entire southeastern United States," he said.
Pryer said she wishes UNC "every success" in sustaining the herbaria, but she recognizes that the path ahead will require significant planning to ensure the collections are properly maintained.
"Now UNC needs to finish the job and hire the curators and faculty to match, or this becomes the third-largest pile of specimens in the country, not the third-largest university research herbarium," she said.
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