Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Herbarium (JWC)

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center was founded by Lady Bird Johnson and Helen Hayes as the National Wildflower Research Center in 1982, as a private nonprofit research organization focused on Texas wildflowers. The herbarium at the Center was established in 1987 to support ongoing research efforts in species conservation, ex-situ plant conservation (including seed banking), habitat restoration, and landscape ecology. Although some of the earliest accessions in the herbarium carry the stamp of the National Wildflower Research Center, the institution was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1997 in recognition of Mrs. Johnson’s environmental legacy as well as the Center’s evolution into a major regional botanical garden. Subsequently, the Center joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2006 as one of its research units. The JWC herbarium’s collections almost exclusively voucher research projects conducted over the years by its staff and associates, as well as samples collected on behalf of the Millennium Seed Bank.