Botany — The Yale Herbarium

The Fenn Flora

The Yale Herbarium in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Botany holds the earliest known collection of flora from Connecticut, over 1,000 botanical specimens collected and assembled in the New Haven area in 1822 by Horatio Nelson Fenn, then a student at the Yale Medical College.

This flora is contained in 4 leather bound volumes titled A Collection of Plants of New Haven and its Environs Arranged According to the Natural Orders of Jussieu. These 4 volumes, which were deteriorating and in extremely fragile condition, have gone through a comprehensive program to conserve and restore them to a condition suitable for research, teaching and exhibit use. This conservation project has been made possible through 2 grants awarded to the Yale Peabody Museum, in 1995 and 1996, by The Bay Foundation.

Fenn and Eli Ives

During his medical studies, Fenn lived at the home of Eli Ives, Professor of Materia Medica and Botany, and Lecturer in the diseases of children. Ives had taught at the medical institute from its inception in 1813 and lectured on materia medica and botany throughout his tenure at Yale. Student notebooks containing his lectures describe the medicinal values of many local and foreign botanical treatments and cures as prescribed by Ives. Many of the species that Ives described in his lectures can also be found in Fenn’s 4-volume herbarium. This implies that Ives required his students, or at least those interested in pharmacology, to study and collect the local plants related to medicinal botany.

Ives created what is probably one of the first botanical gardens in New England at what is presently the northeast corner of Temple and Wall Streets in New Haven, Connecticut. He arranged the indigenous plants following the natural order of Jussieu, the arrangement that Fenn used in his herbarium. Fenn may well have collected local plants for Ives’s garden or used plants from it for his collection.

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