Take virtual trip to the arctic with Dorothy Newton Swales, McGill’s “mother of botany”

Heather Rogers, a Digital Humanities student at MA, has taken her research on Dorothy Newton Swales (BSc Plant Pathology, 1921; MSc Bacteriology 1922; Ph.D. University of Manitoba, Mycology 1931) and transformed it into an interactive website so that others can follow the six decades of botanical collections made by the herbarium's first woman curator (1964-1971) and longest serving mentor to young botanists.

"The stories are not just of the plants, but the people who collected them, preserved them, described them. The labels tell the story of where they were collected, what was growing alongside them, who determined their identities. The messy entanglements inspire us to look deeper and closer at the natural world. Reciprocity, symbiosis, mimicry, communication, are some of the ways I frame interactions within the natural world with what are usually considered human traits – which are really not unique to human societies at all," explained Rogers on her approach that draws on the field of Critical Plant Studies and places agency on the plants to have a story of their own to tell.

Read Frieda Beauregard’s (Herbarium) article in the McGill Reporter. View the exhibit.