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| William Dampier, a collector, known as a pirate too |
One of my Biology tasks at a secondary school was to go out into the wild, collect
certain plants, dry them and mount them on nice sheets of paper. I made my
first herbarium and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. But it was not just
fun. By walking in the woods with an atlas of plants in my hands I learnt how
to identify flowers and trees and I learnt a lot of scientific names. It was a great empirical learning experience. But I did not think much
about where all this information in the book came from. I did not realise that
someone in the past had to find the very same plant, describe it, name it and
put it in the system. I would hardly connect all the scientific descriptions
with pirates or adventurous trips to remote places of the world in the past.
However, now I know that a great number of scientific names and features of
various plants are globally known thanks to collectors and travellers. They brought
the plants they had found on their voyages back home and after a precise
description and identification they stored the plant collections for future
generations. Today, we can literally touch these beginnings of systematic
science at various Herbaria in the world. Oxford University Herbaria store the
oldest collections in the UK and the OBGHA is proudly collaborating on updating
the collections with new specimens collected and mounted at the Botanic Garden.
HERBARIUM – a treasure behind the word
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The Herbarium of
Jacob Bobart the Elder |
A herbarium,
as a permanent record of plant species, is a collection of dried preserved
specimens. The term also refers to a building, a scientific institute where the
specimens are stored and researched.
Oxford University Herbaria, established in 1621, includes the oldest Herbarium in the UK
and is the fourth oldest in the world. It is home to approximately
1,000,000 botanical specimens, rare botanical books, manuscripts and
illustrations. The total collection comprises phanerogams, angiosperms,
gymnosperms, algae, lichens, fungi, ferns, slime moulds, liverworts, mosses,
hornworts. Moreover, incredible collections of fruits, seeds, pollen, wood and
spirit-preserved material can be found in the Herbaria collections.
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| A sheet of marine plants produced as a souvenir |
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| Lichens collection |
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| Fungi collection |
Amongst all
the treasures, the Herbaria shelter 30,000 type specimens, which are of
significant importance. A type specimen
is a specimen, which was first used by researchers when new species were
described and to which the scientific name was formally attached. There are
also some historically important collections such as the herbaria amassed by William Sherard, Charles Du Bois, William Dampier or John Sibthorp. Moreover, a great prominence is
given to the collections of plants which are now extinct in the wild.
Is the physical material so important?
We already
know that the herbarium is a collection of dried plants that has been brought
and collected together from across the world. But why is it so important to
collect plants, dry and store them for other generations? Well, there are a
couple of reasons that have encouraged the collectors and botanists to gather
plants for centuries. As Dr Stephen Harris, the curator of Oxford University Herbaria, explained:
“Plant collections allow us to identify
and locate plants in time and space, to answer fundamental questions about
plant evolution and reveal the diversity of plant life.”
Furthermore,
herbaria are essential for:
- the study
of plant taxonomy
- the study
of geographic distributions
- the stabilising
of nomenclature
- gathering
information about population, climate, and scientific and historical
changes
Researchers
from many disciplines find the collections very useful. For instance, they use the collections as
sources of DNA for phylogenetic analysis, of pollen for climate change analysis and of stems for carbon dating.
The process of creation
The plants
collected in a field or in gardens (in our case at the University of Oxford
Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum) are spread flat on sheets of newsprint
and dried in a plant press, usually between cardboard sheets. When dried, the
specimens are mounted onto sheets of acid-free paper by using a special
acid-free paper tape, acid-free linen thread or pH-neutral glue. Soft or bulky
parts of plants, as well as fruits and seeds are put into paper or display
envelopes. As paper was expensive in the past, multiple specimens were mounted
on one sheet and bound into a book (e.g. the Herbarium of Jacob Bobart the
Elder). The modern preference is to mount one specimen per sheet. The sheets
are then sealed into plastic bags, frozen and then acclimatised back to room
temperature. An important part of such a sheet is a label with all the
important information about the plant: the name and the family of the specimen,
locality, description of the plant, accession number, date of collection and who has collected it. All this information comes from the database connected to
BRAHMS, into which it was typed soon after collection.
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Malus 'Ormiston Roy'
(mounted specimen) |
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Malus 'Ormiston Roy'
(living plant) |
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| Magnolia sieboldii ssp. sinensis |
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| Magnolia sieboldii ssp. sinensis |
Nearly four
centuries of botany lie on the sheets of herbaria. The dried samples have witnessed
the progress of botany from the early steps of first collectors, who tried to
transform the unknown wild plants into precisely described and named scientific
specimens, towards the molecular approaches of modern scientists. It is a great
pleasure to continually update these collections and become a part of that
history... the history of beautiful botanical collections with great historical
value and significant contribution to science.
Veronika Zvijakova
(Erasmus student at the Botanic Garden)
