The Macrospecimen and the Microspecimen

To the naked eye, a tree looks like a bunch of wood and leaves, but trees create tiny art that can only be seen with a microscope.

These geometric designs are grains of pollen produced by the flowering dogwood.

They don't just cause allergies; pollen is used in plant reproduction, to spread genetic material to other plants and produce seeds that are genetically diverse.  All trees big or small produce these tiny spores.

To study these pollen grains in greater detail, scientists use scanning electron microscopy (SEM)—a powerful tool that magnifies objects over 1,000 times, revealing their structure and texture with incredible clarity.

SEM uses a beam of electrons to scan a specimen. Electrons hit the sample, scatter, and are detected and analyzed to create a magnified image of the specimen.

The Gretchen and Stanley Jones Palynological Collection in the Philecology Herbarium at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas contains over 5,000 microscope slides and thousands of microscopy images, focused on the study of pollen.

Nearly all of the slides and images in the collection feature pollen collected from a pressed plant specimen held in herbaria around the United States.