Jose Vera Santos
Memorial Herbarium
History
The University of the Philippines Herbarium was established in 1908, during a period dubbed as the “Golden Age of Philippine Botany” (Pelser and others 2011). American botanist Elmer D. Merrill (1876-1956) led much of the floristic research conducted at the time, unsurpassed in Asia until he left the country in the early 1920s (Robbins 1958). The Herbarium was originally located in Ermita, Manila then the main campus of the University of the Philippines (UP) system. Given its proximity to the Bureau of Science herbarium (now the Philippine National Herbarium, or the PNH), the UP herbarium was largely overlooked. Merrill, who was head of the UP Botany Department from 1912 to 1918, lamented the usage of the Herbarium merely as an instructional tool; to him, herbarium work necessitated museum activities (Asis 1975). The lack of funds given to the Herbarium also greatly impeded its development. Tragically, the Herbarium and its collections were destroyed during the liberation of Manila in 1945, during the Second World War. Most, if not all, specimen accessions prior to the war were not preserved. In 1946, after the war, the rehabilitation of the Herbarium was undertaken by Dr. Jose Vera Santos† (1908-1987). Most of the initial specimen accessions came from Santos’ personal collection. By 1949, the Herbarium was housed in UP Diliman, at Pavilion 4, in what was then known as the College of Arts and Sciences. Much of the Herbarium’s collections at the time were either stored in cabinets along the corridors of Pavilion 4 or in faculty rooms and laboratories. It was only in 1978 that the Herbarium’s collections were consolidated and a room dedicated to its purpose was secured. The bulk of the work in organizing and expanding the Herbarium’s collections were done by Leonardo L. Co† (1953 -2010) and Dr Prescillano M. Zamora† (1933-2010), then director of the Institute of Biology (Co, unpublished notes).
Efforts to improvise and expand the Herbarium were formalized in 1989 by Zamora, with the main purpose of restoring damaged specimens and acquiring new specimens. The Herbarium gained international recognition in 1990, when it was listed in the Index Herbariorum with the acronym PUH. In 1999, it was officially renamed as the Jose Vera Santos Memorial Herbarium.