The Swingle Plant Anatomy Reference Collection

The Whitlock lab at the University of Miami is proud to be the home of the Swingle Plant Anatomy Reference Collection.  This collection consists of several thousand carefully prepared microscopic slides showing sections of leaves, stems and flower buds. Most of the slides are of citrus or citrus relatives in the family Rutaceae, although a wide variety of flowering plant species are also represented. Much of the material is from plants cultivated in the Miami area, including at the University of Miami, the Kampong, and Chapman Field of U.S.D.A.  Other specimens were collected from the wild early in the 20th century from far-off places such as the Congo, the Philippines, New Caledonia, and China.

In 2008, the University of Miami Libraries awarded a Digital Library Fellowship to Dr. Whitlock to digitize the Swingle Collection. Our first goal is to create a searchable online catalog. We will also provide online high-quality digital images of selected plant sections. In the meantime, anyone interested in learning more about this valuable resource should contact Barbara Whitlock.

A brief biography of W. T. Swingle

Walter Tennyson Swingle was born in 1871 on a farm in Canaan Township, Pennsylvania.  He received his B.S. at the age of 14 from Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) and joined the United States Department of Agriculture a few years later in 1891.  One of Swingle’s first tasks was a survey of citrus growing areas in Florida.  This began a long and productive career in citrus biology.  His work in Florida was put on hold in 1894 after a bad freeze devastated the industry.  During this time, he left for training in plant anatomy in Germany and at the prestigious Marine Zoological Institute of Naples.  In 1941, Swingle retired from the U.S.D.A. and became Consultant of Tropical Botany and Head of the Swingle Plant Research Laboratory at the University of Miami.  Shortly afterwards, in 1943, he published his three volume masterpiece “The Botany of Citrus and its Relatives of the Orange Subfamily” which remains the premier reference for all things citrus.

Swingle was good friends with Dr. David G. Fairchild (the founder of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Kampong) with whom he shared a passion for tropical plants.  His work includes descriptions of dozens of new species and new genera in the citrus family.  The genus Swinglea was named by E. D. Merrill in his honor, and includes one species S. glutinosa, known as "tabog," native to the Philippines.  A tree of Swinglea (photo at left) until recently grew at the Kampong, Dr. Fairchild’s former home in Coconut Grove, Florida, now administered by the National Tropical Botanic Garden.

The University of Miami holds Swingle’s personal papers in the Archives and Special Collections of Richter Library. 

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