Find out about Herbarium, Seed Banks and Fungarium
​in botanic gardens, mueums and botanical and horticultural societies around the world

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What is a Herbarium?
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A Herbarium is a place where collections of dried plant specimens and pressed and plant material are preserved and stored for use research purposes by botanists and scientists.

Present day herbaria include more than just herbarium specimens. Records of reference material can include drawings, paintings, prints, slides and digital photographs.

Whether you use Herbariums or Herbaria for the plural probably depends on how much Latin you know and whether you think it's important - I've decided to use both!

Reference:
Wikipedia - Herbarium

Herbaria around the World
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The aim of this page is to develop a list of herbariums which are accessible by botanical artists.

Below you will find a list of some of the key collections in Herbarium, Seed Banks and Funagarium in the UK and some of the USA, Europe and Australia

As the list develops and grows I'll split country data off into separate pages - which will be accessible from this page - so please make a bookmark! 

​Also listed are the names of botanical artists who regularly work from herbarium specimens. This list will grow over time.

At the end I've included a list of Virtual Herbariums - which are accessible no matter where you are located in the world.  The advantage of the virtual herbarium is they provide large scale magnified images of plant material.

PLEASE CONTACT ME with suggestions for more Herbariums and Seed Banks that are accessible to botanical artists

Matthew C. Pace, assistant curator at the Steere Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden, explains what you need to know about herbariums.

GO TO: Basic Plant Collecting and Pressing for a series of videos outlining how you too can start your very own a Herbarium!

The Herbarium Handbook
Paperback: 348 pages
Publisher: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew; Third Edition, edition (5 Sept. 2000)

This is the commonly recognised standard reference manual for how to create herbarium specimens from plant material.

BUY THIS BOOK

Herbarium Handbook 3rd Edition - from Amazon.co.uk

Herbarium Handbook 3rd Edition from Amazon.com

The Herbarium Handbook

Botanical artists working with plant material

Other artists working with plant material

Lucy T. Smith is an Australian botanical artist (and winner of the Margaret Flockton Award 2014) based in the UK. She works on commissions for the scientists at Kew Gardens and regularly draws from the plant material kept in the Herbarium.

Rachel Pedder Smith is also a botanical artist who works for Kew. You may have seen her huge Herbarium specimen painting. You can download a key to the various seed and plant material in her huge painting. She has also produced a watercolour painting of an extensive collection of beans
Both artists also produce work for commission. (This is an article about her painting Herbarium Specimen Painting at Kew Gardens in The Telegraph)

Rosemary Wise works for Oxford University Herbaria. She produces artwork for their Tropical Forest Field Guides Project.

The At L'Herbier blog is the online journal of writer and editor Sonya Patel Ellis, founder of The Herbarium Project. 

The Pressed Plant
by Andrea DiNoto and David Winter 
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (October 18, 1999)

​This is a book which looks at how you can create artwork by pressing and preserving plant material

BUY THIS BOOK

The Pressed Plant from Amazon.co.uk

The Pressed Plant from Amazon.com

The Microfleur Microwave Flower Press
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A recommendation too good not to pass on!

This was recommended to me by somebody who did a lot of flower pressing. The main advantage is that this method apparently preserves the colour of the flowers much better. It weighs 885 g and measures 22.9 x 22.9 x 2.5 cm. There's also a book of instructions - and refill packs for the materials used for pressing.

BUY from Amazon.co.uk Microfleur 9" Microwave Max Flower Press

BUY from Amazon.com Microfleur 9" (23 cm) Microwave Max Flower Press

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Herbariums, Fungariums and Seed Banks - in the UK
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Botanic Gardens in the UK - England

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Kew Gardens Herbarium has more than 7 million specimens collected from all over the world.  Besides being a basis for research, the herbarium also provides the raw pressed plant material for scientific botanical illustrations.  ​The first video (below) explains the history of the Herbarium at Kew Gardens

The next video (below) explains the purpose of a Herbarium.  The Kew Herbarium concentrates on the floristics of non-temperate parts of the world, British and world non-lichenized fungi, grasses and orchids

• The Millennium Seed Bank Library at Wakehurst Place in Sussex ("Kew in the country") stores material on seeds, plant physiology, seed storage and seed germination. The work of this seed back involves collboration with various Botanic Gardens all over the world.

• A variation on a Herbarium is a Fungarium - which houses fungi specimens. The Fungarium at Kew was founded in 1879 provides access to an estimated 1.25 million specimens of dried fungi

The video below explains how Kew produces Seed Guides for different species in different parts of the world using the informstion from specimens housed in the Kew Herbarium.

Botanic Gardens in the UK - Scotland

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh

• The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh houses nearly three million specimens representing half to two thirds of the world's flora.

Filmed in the RBGE Herbarium, this video provides an introduction and practical guide to the art of mounting pressed, dried plant specimens for scientific study.

Herbarium in UK Universities

Oxford University

• The Oxford University Herbaria is the oldest herbarium in the UK and the foruth oldest in the world

Cambridge University

• Cambridge University Herbarium - houses over 1 million pressed, dried and mounted plants. These date back to 1703. Access is available for those who have a research purpose.  The Herbarium also makes special collections available online. These are Darwin's Beagle Plants - the photographic records online appear to be excellent.

Herbaria of Botanical and Horticultural Societies

The Linnean Society

• The Linnean Herbarium - kept by the Linnean Society - has c. 14,300 specimens of which 4,000+ specimens are type specimens for Linnaean names
• Herbaria United is a special project of the Botanical Collection Managers Group (BCMG), a specialist group of the Linnean Society of London. The aim is to provide one bookmark for access to all the collections which are available online

Royal Horticultural Society (Ornamental Plants)

• RHS Herbarium - The emphasis of the RHS Herbarium is ornamental plants - ones typically grown in gardens. It is the largest herbarium dedicated to ornamental plants in the UK. The RHS Herbarium is located at Wisley and includes a number of collections. The original RHS herbarium was auctioned to help repay RHS debts. The existing collection started in 1917, although the oldest specimen is from 1731. Download a list of nomenclature standards (139kB pdf) and View the list of type specimen (1.1MB pdf)

Herbarium in Museums

Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum concentrates on the flora of Europe (including the UK), Central and North America, together with British and world lichenized fungi, algae, mosses and liverworts.  

The Natural History Museum has a range of botanical collections in their Herbarium.  ​These include:

• The Sir Hans Sloane Herbarium - The Sloane Herbarium contains volumes 1-7 of plant specimens collected on Sloane's voyage to Jamaica (1687-1689)
• The John Clayton Herbarium - John Clayton (1694-1773) - an early plant collector in Virginia
• The Paul Hermann Herbarium - Paul Hermann's collection was created in the 1670s and is one of the first major collections of the botany of the East Indies.
• The George Clifford Herbarium - A herbarium of over 3,000 specimens collected by George Clifford (1685-1760), a wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant. 
•  a Digital Collection of Botanical specimens - 

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Herbarium in Europe
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Germany

Berlin - Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

• Founded in 1819, the Herbarium of the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem houses 3.6 million dried and preserved plants and is the largest herbarium in Germany. 

Netherlands

• The National Herbarium of the Netherlands (NHN) - This is the Department of Botany of Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The botanical collections of Naturalis consist of the herbaria from Leiden, Utrecht, and Wageningen universities. The focal areas are Southeast Asia, tropical America, tropical Africa and the Netherlands.

Scandinavia

• List of Nordic Herbaria - in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden

• The Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki - c.3.3 million herbarium specimens of plants and fungi which comprise the national herbarium of Finland

• Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo

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Herbarium in the USA
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Herbarium in Botanical Gardens in the USA​

Chicago Botanical Garden

• The Nancy Poole Rich Herbarium - Home to nearly 20,000 specimens, but is continually growing. Includes flora of Cook County, Illinois; flora of the tallgrass prairie; plant exploration trips in Asia; and horticultural and native plants in the Garden's living collections

EXHIBITION:
Pressing for Plants: Herbaria in Books
Volumes embedded with plant specimens on display.
Rather than a botanical illustration of a leaf, stem, root, seed, and flower to describe a specimen, the actual plants are pressed into the pages often with artistic flare.

Venue: Chicago Botanical Garden - Regenstein Center, Lenhardt Library
Dates: Friday, August 12 – Sunday, November 6, 2016
Library Talk: Sunday, September 11, 2016 2 p.m.

Denver Botanical Gardens

• Denver Botanic Gardens’ herbaria document vascular plant and fungal biodiversity and species distribution in Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountain Region.

A time lapse video of what it takes to create new and storage meeting contemporary standards for a herbarium
​With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the herbaria received new storage that will allow for 20 years of plant and fungal collection growth. The Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi is the most active and largest macrofungal herbarium in Colorado.

New York Botanical Gardens

• The C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium - an electronic gateway to the collections of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium (c. 7.3 million plant and fungi specimens). The project to digitise the collection currently comprises c. 1.3 million herbarium specimens and 225,000 high-resolution specimen images.

Barbara Thiers, Ph.D., Director of the The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden, reveals the inner workings of this unique collection of over 7 million dried plant specimens.

Herbarium in Universities in the USA

Harvard

• Harvard University Herbaria - Home - The Harvard University Herbaria, with more than 5 million specimens, is one of the 10 largest Herbaria in the world in number of specimens, and along with the library, form the world's largest university owned herbarium and the 3rd largest herbaria in the USA.
• The Glass Flowers | Harvard University Herbaria - The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, popularly known as the Glass Flowers - commissioned in 1886 to aid in teaching and serve as the premier botany exhibit. 847 life-size models representing 780 species and varieties of plants in 164 families as well as over 3,000 models of enlarged parts.

REFERENCE:

• Glass Flowers: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants - This unique collection of over 4,000 models, representing more than 830 plant species, was  created by glass artisans Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father and son from Dresden, Germany.
• Glass Flowers | Wikipedia

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University of Michigan

• The University of Michigan Herbarium - this is home to some 1.7 million specimens of vascular plants, algae, bryophytes, fungi, and lichens.

Herbarium and collaborating institutions in the USA

California

• The Consortium of California Herbaria - this site acts as a gateway to over 2 million specimen records from over 30 participating institutions in California

Front facade of Harvard University Herbaria building, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Glass model of a twig of the Cashew, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, by L & R Blaschka

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Herbarium in Australia
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Queensland

University of Melbourne Herbarium (MELU)

• The University of Melbourne Herbarium (MELU) is the largest university herbarium in Australia with approximately 100,000 specimens
• Queensland Herbarium - Located at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens Mt Coot-tha. Houses more than 830,000 specimens, representing Queensland’s native and naturalised plant species

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Virtual Herbarium
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UK

• Oxford University - The Virtual Field Herbarium - This is a project to develop field guides (to identify plants and trees) within and for communities around tropical forests in developing countries. It includes The Tropical Plant Field Guide (the virtual field herbarium) - which in turn includes drawings, paintings, printed drawing etc

USA

• The C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium - the gateway to the digitized specimens of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. Currently, 3 million specimen records and 2 million images are available. ​

​EUROPE

• National Depository of Living Systems | Digital Herbarium of the Moscow State University - Moscow University "Noah's Ark" Aaimts to create a multifunctional network storage of biological material.
  
• The Herbarium Berolinense - the digital virtual herbarium of the The Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem  (part of the Freie Universität Berlin)
• The Virtual Herbarium of Lake Van Basin This is a very comprehensive Turkish website available with limited English translation which provides a virtual herbarium and high quality magnified images of plant material

ASIA

• The Chinese Virtual Herbarium - not very accessible but worth a look if you turn on Google translate

​AUSTRALIA

• Australian Virtual Herbarium - The AVH provides access to collections held in Australian herbaria which, between them, house over seven million plant, algae and fungi specimens.

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BACK: Botanical Art and Artists

• Plant Forms and Anatomy
• Scientific instruction in botanical illustration
• Plant Evolution and Taxonomy
• Botanical Gardens and Herbaria
• Recording a Plant
• Plant Pressing for your own Herbarium

NEXT: 

• National Plant Collections (coming soon)
• Blogs about plants and flowers