Herbarium

An exceptional collection of preserved specimens of the plant and fungal kingdoms collected in Scotland and around the world.

Explore the Herbarium

The World in One Room

With three million preserved plant specimens, collected over 350 years, the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh has become a scientific resource of worldwide importance. Watch our short film to see how the world's biodiversity is brought together in one building for study.

What is a herbarium?

A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens stored, catalogued and arranged systematically as a reference of the diversity of the plant and fungal kingdoms.

The creation of a herbarium specimen involves the pressing and drying of plants between sheets of paper, a practice that has changed very little over four centuries of plant collecting for study. Pressed specimens are arranged to show the characteristics most useful for identifying the species. Characteristics that cannot be preserved (e.g. flower colour, scent, height of a tree, vegetation type) are written on the collection label by the collector. Most importantly, the label should tell us where and when the specimen was collected.

A working reference collection

A herbarium acts like a plant library or catalogue in which each of  specimen provides unique information – where it was found, when it flowered, what it looks like and it’s DNA, which remains intact for many years. DNA is routinely extracted from herbarium specimens. The most important specimens are called 'types'. The type specimen, chosen by the author of the name, becomes the physical reference against which all members of a species can be compared.

This unique working reference collection brings species from all over the world together into one place to be discovered, described and compared. The work is disseminated through the writing of Floras (a description of all the plants in a country or region), monographs (a description of plants or fungi within a group, such as a family) and scientific papers. This fundamental research provides an essential baseline for other plant-based research and helps inform conservation practices.

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