When Herbarium researcher Mark Darrach received photographs of a plant species he didn’t recognize, he decided to investigate.

Mark traveled to just north of Leavenworth where this plant was initially discovered. The minute he saw it in the field, he knew they had something new in front of them. When he returned to the Herbarium, he was pleasantly surprised to find a specimen of a similar plant that was filed under an existing species name.

“The person who collected it recognized it was something different and added an annotation tag on the specimen here, that suggested that it needed to be followed up on but nobody had followed up on it yet,” said Mark.