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Fans of Beatles member John Lennon, The Who guitarist Peter Townshend or The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger might be surprised to find the LSU Herbarium holds a collection of psychedelic mushrooms the musicians experimented with.The mushrooms are part of the original fungal collection donated by the Herbarium’s former director Bernard Lowy, who also used the mushrooms during a trip with Life magazine. “This is some of the collection he made from the mushrooms he was doing,” said collection manager Diane Ferguson said as she held up a jar of the dehydrated mushrooms, just a handful of tiny, brown fungi.Ferguson said the Herbarium also houses more than 180,000 species of plants. The collection maintains the oldest collections of preserved plants in the Gulf South, which dates back to 1869.In addition to plants and fungi, the lab also houses a lichen collection.”We’re actually two herbaria combined – plant herbaria and the Bernard Lowy Mycological Herbarium,” Ferguson said.Americus Featherman founded the Herbarium in 1869. A patent officer for the University, Featherman was a professor of botany and romance language.”We have [Featherman’s] original collection housed in the Herbarium,” Ferguson said. “So our collections date back to the 1870s and earlier.”Located at the Life Sciences Annex, the Herbarium is equipped to preserve and archive the various specimens. The first step is to place the plant between sheets of paper in a plant press and then let the plant dehydrate in a plant drier.”That usually takes two to three days,” Ferguson said.Then the plant is weighted with washers and placed on acid-free paper with acid-free glue. Once the plant has been mounted, it is ready to be placed in the climate-controlled archives.”The archives are kept at 70 degrees with constant humidity,” Ferguson said.The archives are 50 rows of cabinets holding different families of plant species. While the lab holds more than 180,000 specimen, the Herbarium has a capacity of 800,000.”Most herbaria are crammed full, and we have all this,” Ferguson said.Ferguson said the University’s herbarium has been used for several different consulting opportunities. She said the lab has consulted with the AgCenter, coastal environment groups, the government, private citizens and the John Lafitte National Park and Preserve.The plants are catalogued and placed in a digital database that shows the taxonomy, facts and an image of the specimen.”We are digitizing all of our collection so anyone in the world now can go to our Web site and see our specimen,” Ferguson said. “This is probably the best in the country.”Lowell Urbatsch, director of the Herbarium, said the digitizing of the database began in 1992 and served to capture and label data from each specimen. Making the database available online allows anyone to access the collection, he said.”The technology is exceedingly important,” Urbatsch said. “Otherwise someone is restricted to physically visiting the Herbarium.”Yalma Vareas, biology graduate student, has been working at the Herbarium for more than a year. She said she goes into the field to find new specimen to add to the collection and then archives those plants. Vareas said the job can be very thrilling.”You can find a new species,” she said. “This is the kind of work that helps other people protect the environment.”Other herbaria in the region include the universities of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana at Monroe.- – – -Contact Sean Griffin at [email protected]