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They came in together. They went out together.
And in the 29 years in between, Jim Massey and Mary Felton grew to resemble an
old married couple, each knowing the other would always be there.
They had their disagreements -- "Maybe she thinks I should do it, and I think
she should do it," Massey said last spring -- but like any marriage that lasts,
their partnership was grounded by mutual respect and support.
"We have a united public front," Massey said.
Said Felton: "We know we have to work together. If we hit snags, we can iron
them out. We haven't had any knockdown, drag-out fights yet."
The two retired Aug. 1, Massey as curator of the biology department's
herbarium, Felton as his loyal assistant.
The boss is a mere 60. The loyal assistant, 83.
Why work until you're 83? For Felton, the answer was simple.
"It was just fun," she said. "And besides, what else can you do?"
To hear her tell it, what Felton did for 29 years at the herbarium was whatever
Massey had in mind.
"He's the boss," Felton said. "He tells you what needs to be done. He tells me
how to do it, and he lets me alone and I get it done."
But Massey will tell you that Felton was more colleague than underling.
"Fortunately, she doesn't just do what she's told," he said.
In fact, Felton could run the place. And that was critical, given that she and
Massey were the herbarium's only permanent employees.
"The feeling to be free to go out to meetings, to close my door and know
everything here is taken care of, that means everything," Massey said.
Hearts of the herbarium
When Massey hired Felton in 1971 just a few months after he started here
himself, her main task was mounting the thousands of botanical specimens in the
herbarium, which serves as a kind of research library stocked with plants
rather than books.
Specimens come in from all over the world, their dried and pressed leaves,
stems and roots sandwiched between newspaper pages. Laboring over a worktable,
Felton prepared them to be adhered to paper guaranteed to last 2,000 years,
using tweezers to transfer the delicate material from a glue-covered pane of
glass. She stitched down specimens with roots too thick to be secured by
glue.
Other mounters came and went during Felton's career -- four others were on hand
to help when she started, none when she left. All told, more than 600,000
specimens were mounted in her 29 years, enough to fill a big chunk of the
400-plus seven-foot-high cabinets that house the herbarium in Coker Hall.
Along with mounting specimens, Felton used a computer to track specimen loans
and exchanges. And she took on clerical tasks when the herbarium lost a
secretary in the early 1990s because of budget cuts.
But Felton didn't just work with plants and office equipment. She also showed
students the ins and outs of how a herbarium operates.
"Her good humor, patience and ready smile gave heart to the herbarium," said
Peter White, director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, which took over
the herbarium July 1.
Felton has a sympathetic ear, said Massey, who taught classes here and
benefited from Felton's way with students. She sometimes would step in to calm
them on their way to complain to Massey about a grade or other matter.
"She has mothered several generations of University students," Massey said.
And students benefited from Massey, too.
"Jim Massey was an inspiring teacher -- I have met more undergraduates, former
graduate students and lay people who are loyal and exuberant Jim Massey fans,"
White said. "Together, Jim and Mary ran a great ship and kept the herbarium in
fine shape for the future."
Capturing moments
The largest in the Southeast, the herbarium tied a Smithsonian herbarium
in a recent survey measuring collection activity. Scientists -- primarily
ecologists and taxonomists with expertise in systematic botany -- come to the
herbarium to examine specimens beneath microscopes, and specimens also go out
on loan and through exchanges.
The oldest specimen dates to 1857; some represent endangered species or species
no longer found in the place where they were collected.
And those places may be far away or just blocks away -- the herbarium contains
a type of lily once found where Chapel Hill's Eastgate Shopping Center now
stands. In fact, the herbarium serves as a depository for the Raleigh-based
N.C. Heritage Program, a nature conservancy for the state's rare plant species.
Herbarium specimens also serve to capture a moment in time that's forever
lost.
"If you saved a specimen in 1910, you can't ever save that specimen again,"
Massey said. "It really becomes a priceless thing."
The herbarium is critical to preserving the present as well as the past, Massey
said. Plants growing in the wild need to be collected now because they may not
be there tomorrow.
"Much of what we know about endangered species and their distribution comes
from herbarium records," Massey said.
Space crunch
Collecting more specimens in the wild means filling more space in the
herbarium, and that's a problem. The Coker Hall facility is running out of
room.
"We really have been crowded since we started," Massey said.
But that's going to change.
Plans are under way for a new herbarium to be built as part of an
expansion/renovation project to the Botanical Garden off N.C. Highway 54.
The new facility will be big enough to store 2 million specimens.
State-of-the-art technology will fumigate the specimens before they're stored,
ridding them of any insects, and climate-control devices will keep them
bug-free. In Coker Hall, where temperature can't be regulated as precisely, the
specimens must be fumigated regularly.
With more space, the new facility may also become the home of other herbaria,
Massey said. "We hope it will take on a more regional character," he said.
There won't just be room for more specimens. There also will be more room for
the people studying them.
"Now, we have to say, `You can stay, but I can't promise you the same work
space every day,'" Massey said.
The space also will enable the herbarium to expand its outreach programs for
the public and school groups. Plans even call for a mini-herbarium with public
access so that area residents can do research, too.
"They want to know, `Is that what we have growing in our yard?'" Massey said.
Not only will the facility have more room, it will be more convenient, he said.
There will be plenty of on-site parking for visitors, volunteers and
researchers. That's not the case with Coker Hall.
"We've had to be apologetic for our public outreach because of limited space
and access," Massey said.
Does Massey regret retiring before the herbarium moves to its new digs? No.
"Going to this new phase, it should be [a curator] who's going to be there a
while -- get rid of the old fogies."
As for Felton, she had no intention of breaking in a new partner.
"I told [Massey] I wouldn't work for anybody else," she said. "If he went, I
went."
Planting the seeds
The Botanical Gardens has a dream that will take more than sun and water to
grow.
It will take seed money provided by private donors who share in the dream.
The total cost of the new herbarium and library building at the North Carolina
Botanical Garden is expected to cost about $8 million, including site work,
parking and architecture fees, said Peter S. White, director of the Botanical
Garden.
A new Visitor Education Center will cost about $4 million.
So far, about $3 million in private funds have been raised for the visitor's
center and about $400,000 for the herbarium.
The University Board of Trustees approved both projects and the State
Construction Office has approved the proposed designs.
Building will start when money becomes available to do so.
"Because the herbarium is an academic teaching and research building and the
archive of specimen documents representing the flora of the whole state, we
hope that the legislature, which gave us design money, will also come through
with construction money as well," White said.
The state-of-the-art building would house what is the largest museum collection
of plant specimens in the Southeastern U.S.
"Being a public garden, the facility would immediately communicate to the
public the tremendous data and information that the University has accumulated
and how it serves the state, region and nation," White said.
Checks should be made out to the Botanical Garden Foundation and sent to
Charlotte Jones-Roe at CB# 3375 in the Totten Center.
Internship honors Felton
Mary Felton touched many students' lives in her 29 years at Carolina, and now
her friends and colleagues plan to honor her with a tribute that will touch
future students, too -- and in a tangible way.
Once funded, the Mary McKee Felton Herbarium Internship will give students
valuable hands-on experience with herbarium methods and techniques of specimen
curation.
So far, donors have given $35,000 to create an endowment to fund the
internship. A minimum of $50,000 is needed to support a stipend of this type.
Checks should be made out to the Mary McKee Felton Herbarium Fund and sent to
Charlotte Jones-Roe at CB# 3375 in the Totten Center.
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