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The Last Botanist: Of Garbage Plants and Archives
Julija Šukys
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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The Place: Heidelberg University Herbarium (Tiffin, Ohio)
The Date: April 4, 2026
The Subject: Noel Mano, PhD and Duckweed Expert
Over two days in spring 2026, botanist Noel Mano and I explored the files of a neglected, poorly preserved, and incomplete collection of pressed plant specimens collected by students and faculty over decades and housed in an animal lab. Mano is likely the last of his kind at Heidelberg University. When we met, he had just accepted a new position at a different university. Botany, he told me, is no longer fashionable and the school was unlikely to hire someone interested and able to use the crumbling and idiosyncratic collection. As we read and examined specimen after specimen, seeds fell from the files and littered our worktable. I collected them in what Mano and I took to calling my “botanical debris bag.” I still have it on my desk at home. Thus far, I haven’t dared plant its contents.
After Mano’s departure the herbarium will likely either be donated or discarded. The archive contains more than plants; we found 1930s newspapers used for mounting. These featured personal and typewriter ads and newspaper articles about the Watergate scandal. We found many specimens collected by students during 1970s and ’80s field trips to a bog in West Virginia, the home state of a former faculty member, as well as duplicate specimens from Penn State’s herbarium (these are the oldest of the collection). Our favorite file came from a local landfill site, whose garbage plants fascinated us both.
The Heidelberg Herbarium paints an idiosyncratic portrait of natural history, pedagogical legacy, social ephemera, and the resilience of both plant and human life. Over those days we spent together, Mano and I talked about botanical matter, archives, and the small dramas of academia. Once we’d finished our work, we hopped into Mano’s car and drove out to the Senecal Landfill site together. Although it is fenced off, it no longer takes in waste. On that April day, spring flowers stood in the pouring rain, poised to bloom.
Julija Šukys: Let’s describe what we have here.
Noel Mano: This is a folder from Seneca Landfill.
JŠ: This is my choice. I wanted to see what the garbage plants looked like. When we saw this file, I said this is kind of your jam because these are resilient and adaptable plants. Plants that can grow literally on a garbage dump.
NM: Yes.
JŠ: Duckweed, you were telling me, can grow in sewage.
NM: It can grow in polluted waters, up to and including sewage and animal manure runoff.
JŠ: And you’ve tested it in what is—what is the, the active ingredient in Roundup?
NM: Glyphosate.
JŠ: Right. Okay, so what else do we have here?
NM: We have Solomon’s seal, which is a showy little flower.
JŠ: It’s a false Solomon’s seal, though, which is interesting.
NM: Oh, yes, I missed that. Yes, thank you. They all look to be collected by the same person on a single day, in May 1993.
JŠ: May 12th, 1993. Obviously, this person went out to the landfill with…I don’t know…a pair of scissors or shears or something and uprooted some stuff. This looks like a trillium. In Ontario, of course, it’s illegal to pull these out of the ground or to even pick them. Growing up, trilliums were sacred flowers that we were not allowed to touch.
NM: But would you enforce that in the garbage dump?
JŠ: I would have! I was a trillium fascist as a kid. I was very protective of them because we had been told— I don’t know if it’s true—that if you picked a trillium, it wouldn’t bloom again for seven years. Our forest floors were full of white trilliums. This looks like one of the purple ones that grow in the US. I’m surprised to see a trillium. They’re fussy and hard to grow. You can’t just pop a trillium in randomly into whatever ecosystem and expect it to thrive. So, what does this tell you?
NM: This trillium here is growing in or has been collected alongside wild geranium, wild ginger…stuff that we think of as weeds. Now, I wonder if the fact that this is happening in a landfill has to do with the fact that no one is going to landscape a landfill. You dump whatever trash, then put soil on it, and whatever grows, grows.
JŠ: People aren’t trampling it either. Nobody’s going for walks in a landfill.
NM: Exactly. I think that’s why. No one’s managing it; no one’s cultivating it; and it is just allowed to do its own thing. When I was on a job interview, one of my sessions was with a microbiologist and who had this sign on the door. It was a meme with two dogs, two shibas. One’s a sad, crying shiba and the other’s a strong one. The strong one is like, “I will grow anywhere!” But the little crying dog is like the bacteria you want to cultivate but if the pH is off by .0001, then forget it.
JŠ: That’s the trillium. I have tried to grow these. That’s totally the trillium.
NM: Exactly.
JŠ: I’ve had two. I think I planted...I don’t know...12? And only two of them survived.
NM: You do all these things, it doesn’t grow. And then…
JŠ: Then you go to the garbage dump, and there it is. So, it’s a plant that just needs to be left alone by humans.
NM: Exactly.
JŠ: The other thing about the collector who put this together...these are very detailed notes. They’re specific about exactly what these plants are, where they were found. The names are precise. Both the Latin and common names are present.
I like this file. It’s not just about species and variety. Instead, this is a portrait of one person on one day. It tells a story of resilience. It also tells us something about the collector. I’m not sure what, but it tells us something.
NM: I think someone is very interesting if their idea of how to spend a day in May is at the landfill. Here’s another trillium. And we have Jack-in-the-pulpit over here.
JŠ: I don’t know this one.
NM: This is sometimes considered a weed, and you can see why.
JŠ: No, what do you mean? What should I see when you say that? You mean it doesn’t have attractive leaves?
NM: Right. It’s sort of scrubby.
JŠ: Hard scrabble. Oh, it’s a ranunculus.
NM: Yeah, so it belongs to that buttercup family, and it’s dwarfed by some of its more charismatic members. This is kind of like an oddball collection of just whatever is growing at the landfill on a May day in 1993.
JŠ: To me, this is a form of portraiture. Of place, of time. Of people. Of human-plant interactivity.
NM: Yeah.
JŠ: Of human shittiness, too. You’re just dumping your garbage…and here are plants!
NM: (laughs)
JŠ: I was describing this collection to a friend, and I said, “Well, the herbarium itself doesn’t tell a single story. It tells you several different stories.” And one of those stories is local. It’s about Seneca County, Ohio. It’s a story of pedagogy, mentorship, and of a bunch of guys, botanists, who taught at a tiny college and took their students out on amazing excursions to collect plant specimens.
But you and I keep talking about why one or another specimen is not botanically useful. Some don’t have roots. Others have been cut from a plant of unknown height. Some are mislabeled or undated.
NM: And then, the herbarium shows the tension between doing science and teaching science. Because if you were this very serious scientist, you would tell your students, “All right, we’re going to be really systematic, so all of you go and collect from this place or from this group of plants or this something.” Right? But in the interest of getting students invested in their work, it seems to have been, “well, collect what interests you.” And so, people have collected all sorts of things. It’s not systematic in any way.
JŠ: In fact, this herbarium is mostly a record of professor-student interaction, It’s about mentorship, faculty life, and a lost tradition of botanical pedagogy. I don’t know what scientific value it has, but as an object, this landfill collection tells a story. For me, this is a story of archives and hands-on learning. It’s strangely beautiful in its decaying state.
NM: Unfortunately, I’m leaving this position shortly. And, you know, it’s unlikely that a botanist will be hired in my stead. Back in the day, the argument for keeping the herbarium might have been, “Well, here, a biologist could use that.” But now it is unlikely to be used or even kept after I go.
Look at all these seeds that have come out of those files…
JŠ: We could grow all kinds of things.
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Over a weekend in April 2026, a botanist guided essayist Julija Šukys through his university’s herbarium. It was the last time such a tour would be possible: Noel Mano had accepted a new position and suspected his soon-to-be-former institution would either donate or destroy the collection after his departure. Šukys recorded their conversations as they worked their way through file after file of pressed and crumbling plant matter. The collection tells the story of community, pedagogy, and discovery: of professors and generations of students, their forays into nature, and the collective years-long project of documenting the flora of the surrounding region. Heidelberg’s herbarium is a poignant if crumbling record not only of plant life but also of a lost tradition of mentorship, pedagogy, and a shared intellectual passion now considered retrograde.
Julija Šukys, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007).