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 collected.   Herbariums are dried collections of pressed plant specimens; each is a unique and valuable item of cultural and scientific history.

There are almost 3,000 herbaria around the world with over 380 million plant specimens.  Such vast collections, expensive to make and even more costly to maintain, are often stored in natural history museums or botanic gardens in large cities such as London.

Inside the front archway of Burlington House on Piccadilly in London is the entrance to The Linnaean Society of London, founded in 1788 by Sir James Edward Smith (1758-1828). The society is the world’s longest surviving organisation dedicated to the study and dissemination of knowledge of natural history, evolution and taxonomy.

Famous for being the establishment where the theory of evolution by natural selection was first presented by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, The Linnaean Society contains a vault where thousands of plant specimens are preserved.    The compilations are part of the Carl Linnaeus  personal library and scientific collections and include his herbarium.



Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)


The Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus, compiled the herbarium throughout his life, and it forms the basis for how all modern herbaria are created.    In two series of scientific works, Species Plantarum (published in 1753) and Systema Naturae (1758) Linnaeus established the practice of giving each different organism a generic name (singular-genus; plural-genra) and a specific epithet (the species).

For example humans are Homo sapiens: the Homo being the genus and the sapiens the species.

One of the earliest known surviving herbaria is in Bologna dating from about 1558 is the En tibi perpetuis ridentem floribus hortum meaning “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers” in Bologna.  The En Tibi contains 473 plant specimens and is recognised as the work of botanist Francesco Petrollini.

Herbaria inspire art – watercolour artwork is now included with the mounted plant specimens.  The fashion designer and couturier Alexander McQueen (1969 -2010) regularly visited the Natural History Museum collections and used the flowing form of seaweed specimens to inspire designs.

Herbaria connect us with our history – each object is a remnant of the life of the collector, where they went and when. Herbaria are used to explore the history of the European empire and colonisation, and to illuminate the lives of the people who collected and/or created art from them.

There is a lot more going on inside a flower or on the surface of a leaf than you may imagine.

 A well-curated herbarium is a unique source of information and a gateway to understanding plant diversity. 

"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them" John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)   

Purchase a hand lens and explore the intricacy of plant form.    Explore the fascinating world Herbariums or visit your local history museum or botanic garden.    Enjoy the world of plants and flowers with me. 


          

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