Library and Herbarium

     Sage Mountain Botanical Sanctuary is home to a curated library of over 14,000 unique titles, including much of Rosemary Gladstar’s thirty-year herbalism and earth awareness library. This library offers a premier resource to visitors and program participants for research and education, with a comprehensive botanical section, historic and antiquated texts, and a curated collection of naturalist resources for this region.

     In addition to rooms lined with bookshelves, we also house a rare audiovisual archive of Rosemary’s teachings from classes and programs dating back to the 1970s. This special collection is in the process of being catalogued and protected so that it may be conserved and shared with generations to come. We are also beginning to digitize these offerings to share with a wider audience online.

     Herbaria are a critical resource for biodiversity, ecological, and evolutionary research studies. The dried, preserved plant material of an herbarium serves as a library of historical and biological records, providing a primary data source of plant specimens. Herbaria have great cultural and scientific value that directly benefit humanity, industries, and local communities when accessible to the people. Herbaria are centers of biological study to support research, and record keepers for what’s grown in the past, as well as what’s cultivated currently. In partnership with the nonprofit Canndor Herbarium, we are committed to providing this community resource to preserve cultivar biodiversity as a whole, give voice to the artisanal bounty, and fosters research that benefits the community.

     Herbarium specimens are whole plants or plant parts, that are dried and mounted on a sheet of paper. Along with the physical samples detailed information on where and when the plant was collected, its habitat or cultivation method, and additional phenotypic information. Herbariums housing voucher specimens, or the plant material that was used to describe a particular “type” of plant are of greatest value. This is especially true of herbarium samples that describe a new species or specimens on which the study of a species was founded.

     The Sage Mountain herbarium includes over 4,000 specimens, some dating thirty years, of the Sage Mountain garden and neighboring farms in Central Vermont. Our herbarium provides a botanical library of vascular plants, lichens, fungi, and bryophytes for individual students, researchers, botanical organizations, and conservation agencies.