John Hayden made an unexpected discovery in Gottwald right as the pandemic shutdown began in March 2020. The professor of biology walked into the workroom for the greenhouse. Amid flower pots and bags of soil, he spotted indoor plants with a note: “Please take care of me.”

The writer couldn’t have chosen a better plant steward.

Hayden has been teaching at the University for more than 40 years with a focus on plant biology. He wants to know what plant structures and form can tell us about relationships and diversity. His research centers around the plant family Euphorbiaceae, which includes the Christmas poinsettia and the commercial rubber tree.

“I came to botany through horticulture, basically through gardening,” Hayden explained. “My dad always had a big vegetable garden. He was really big into certain ornamental plants.”

Growing up in northeastern Connecticut, Hayden helped his father protect chrysanthemums from harsh New England winters. After transplanting the flowers to a modest greenhouse, they’d take cuttings for the next year.

“You’ve got one little clump and you go cut, cut, cut,” he said. “You can get a dozen or more pieces, stick them in some moist sand, they strike root, and now you’ve got 12 plants.”

When he started at University of Richmond in 1980, his position came with a supervisory role for the greenhouse and herbarium. Gottwald was newly built, so he worked to fill the sparse greenhouse ranges. Today, the space houses more than 300 species of live plants.

He also reorganized the herbarium, a room in Gottwald that serves as a museum of dried and pressed plants. Curating the collection strengthened Hayden’s ability to differentiate among the species, he said. Currently the herbarium contains about 29,000 species, including useful research specimens and a permanent scientific collection of exceptional plants.

Hayden recounted how Harvard botanist Merritt Lyndon Fernald used the University of Richmond as a base for fieldwork in the 1930s and ’40s. In an area known as the Petersburg Bog, Fernald came across carnivorous pitcher plants with tubular leaves for trapping insects.

Interstate 95 construction later destroyed the bog, but a pressed pitcher plant remains in the herbarium. “We have little fragmentary representation of a long-gone habitat from the past of Virginia,” Hayden said.

This fall, he plans to share his deep plant biology knowledge in courses on Mesoamerican ethnobotany and medical botany. He’s also got a student starting novel research into the hinge-like leaf stalk anatomy of a particular Euphorbia plant species.

And he continues caring for the plants left behind last year. One is a viny houseplant Pothos. “It’s doing much better now,” Hayden said reassuringly.