The Herbarium - is it magic or a warehouse of birth certificates for plants?
As the snow falls today I am reminded that much of the beauty of where we live is created by plants. Today all is white. The flurry of snowfall covers the Hellebores in my garden so I bring them inside. There are an estimated 321,000 species of wild plants and hundreds of thousands of cultivated plants, known as cultivars, on our planet. They bring joy to us all. Here in the Lake District National Park, Cumbria, we have many plants that were imported at the height of the industrial revolution (a period generally spanning from 1760 to 1840). Wealthy “Northern Industrialists” sent “Plant Hunters” all over the world in search of rare and unusual species for the gardens of their holiday homes in the Lakes. Today botanists and horticulturists have multiple ways to understand such huge diversity but a particularly important tool is the Herbarium. Herbariums are rather like plant libraries, a repository of information, cataloguing where plants come from and by who they were co