Before every university course needed a learning-management system, some departments solved the problem by simply putting the teaching collection on the Web.
Visit the Virtual Foliage collection
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Virtual Foliage site is a surviving example of that approach. Its front page is basically an index into teaching collections for general botany, Trees of Wisconsin, plant diversity, Tom Volk’s fungi and Virginia Kline’s vegetation material.
Michael Clayton is identified as photographer and collection manager, and the site’s explanation of the materials is unusually useful because it tells you where the images actually came from.
The General Botany material was created largely by Clayton, with electron micrographs by emeritus professor Eldon Newcomb. The Trees of Wisconsin collection combines Clayton’s work with photographs made by undergraduate dendrology students. Tom Volk’s fungi section comes from Volk’s own slide collection, while Virginia Kline’s vegetation collection was donated by her family after her death.
Plant Diversity is even more collaborative. The site identifies a long list of contributing botanists and records photographer initials in filenames.
That sounds mundane until you consider what usually happens to teaching slides.
They sit in cabinets, migrate between offices, lose labels and eventually become somebody else’s disposal problem.
The Web turned the slide cabinet into infrastructure
The site says these materials were developed for courses taught through UW-Madison’s botany department and could be used by educators in classrooms, lectures and teaching labs.
This was not a public-image dump assembled for search traffic. It was departmental infrastructure.
That distinction matters.
A collection like this preserves not only pictures of plants but the structure of how botany was being taught: Wisconsin trees as a regional unit, general botany as a visual reference, fungi as a specialist collection, plant diversity as a collaborative taxonomic resource.
The linked Tom Volk archive makes the lineage even clearer. Volk says his own fungus pages went online November 25, 1995, after he had already placed several hundred images on a Gopher server beginning in July 1994. He credits Michael Clayton and the UW-Madison botany instructional site with helping him get started online.
So this is not merely an old university webpage that survived.
It is part of the transition from departmental slide libraries and Gopher servers into the public Web.
The design has barely any ceremony around it. A few headings. Image links. Course links. Names of contributors.
That is enough.
The pictures were the point.