Natural world
The botany department's herbarium collections pre-date those of World Museum Liverpool by some 50 years. In 1799 William Roscoe acquired his first herbarium, the Johann Reinhold Forster herbarium, for the soon to be established Liverpool Botanic Garden which was founded in 1802. The garden's collection continued to grow for the next hundred years and was transferred to World Museum Liverpool in 1909.
The next major addition to the collection was in 1952 when the University of Liverpool placed the John Forbes Royle herbarium on deposit, and the main University herbarium was transferred to the Museum between 1974 and 1986.
The herbarium currently contains around 390,000 specimens, the great majority being pressed dried mounted specimens. In addition there are sizeable collections of economic botany and timber samples, seeds, freeze-dried macrofungi and fluid-preserved samples (mainly marine algae).
Botany displays can be mainly found in the Natural History Centre at World Museum Liverpool.
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The herbarium covers 98% of the British and Irish native flora and covers a time-span of over two hundred years.
The European herbarium is particularly significant as a repository of material consulted during the preparation of 'Flora Europaea', a project initially based at the University of Liverpool. As a result of the activity generated by this project, it received numerous foreign collections in exchange for material obtained during fieldwork in Europe, particularly from countries bordering the Mediterranean.
This collection is subdivided into the following geographical areas: North Africa; Atlantic Islands; Orient; Asia; Africa; North America; Central America & Caribbean; South America; Australasia and Oceania.
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The cultivated plant collections are mainly derived from the herbaria of the Liverpool Botanic Gardens and the University of Liverpool's Ness Botanic Gardens. The former herbarium is one of the most complete collections of cultivated vouchers from a Georgian botanic garden. There is also a significant element of cultivated exchange material, mainly from North American botanic gardens and arboreta. The collection is thought to contain numerous potential cultivar standards, which are the equivalent of type specimens for horticultural varieties.
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Three collections are kept separately from the main herbarium on account of their historic importance and the significant number of type specimens each contains. The Roylean herbarium has recently been the subject of a major conservation project.
The Forster Herbarium was the foundation collection of the Liverpool Botanic Garden's herbarium, having been bought from Forster's widow in Halle by William Roscoe in 1799. It includes material collected on Captain James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas, including many types. Localities visited on this epic expedition included South Africa, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tahiti.
The Roylean Herbarium, an historic collection of plants from southern India and the Himalayas was bequeathed to the Liverpool Royal Institution by John Forbes Royle, Professor of Material Medica at King's College, University of London and formerly employed by the British East India Company as director of the Saharanpur Botanic Garden, India.
The Smith Herbarium was the second major collection to have been acquired by the Liverpool Botanic Garden, between 1806 and 1817. The main herbarium of Sir James Edward Smith is kept at the Linnean Society of London, which he co-founded in 1788. As a consequence of his friendship with William Roscoe, Smith sent around 5,000 specimens on exchange to the Garden, greatly strengthening the herbarium's worldwide coverage and including many hundreds of type specimens.
For more information visit the Linnean Society of London website.
The Cryptogamic Herbaria are currently divided into the following sections: Ferns & fern-allies; Mosses; Liverworts; Lichens; non-lichenised Fungi and Algae.
The museum's collections of economic botany samples (3,200 specimens) were obtained mainly from three sources: the University of Liverpool's teaching collection; the Museum of Economic Botany, opened in 1932; and the Liverpool John Moores University's Pharmacognosy collection. Together these form an almost comprehensive reference set of parts of plants and their products such as roots, seeds, fibres, fruits, leaves gums and other extracts.
The timber collections (11,000 specimens) contain a very wide range of standard wood blocks of commercial timbers as well as wild-collected material from field expeditions.
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A recently prepared inventory of exsiccatae listed more than 70 collections of dried plant specimens mounted in bound volumes ('exsiccatae'), which are stored separately in order to preserve their integrity. Several historic collections originally acquired as bound volumes have in the past been disbound and incorporated into the main herbarium sequence; these included the Teesdale herbarium of Rev John Harriman. Many of our exsiccata collections are of seaweeds. The Thomas Velley herbarium consists of eight volumes of marine algae from the south coast of England, and dates from c1800. We have just acquired a copy of Dr JR Hulme's 'The Scarborough Algae' (1842).
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The collection mainly comprises some 200 anatomical models made by the firm of R Brendel & Co in Germany around the turn of the 20th century for display and teaching purposes. Many have removable parts to reveal internal structures. Around 50 models are displayed in the Natural History Centre, the Plant Room and the National Conservation Centre; the remainder are in storage.
The museum holds extensive sets of 19th and early 20th century glass lantern slides, mainly of botanical subjects but with some topographic coverage, as well as thousands of modern 35mm transparencies and some larger-format transparencies mainly of botanical art works. The most notable collections are the hand-coloured lantern slides of Conrad Theodore Green and the photographic archives of Arthur Augustine Dallman.
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The collection of original botanical drawings is small but of high quality, and consists mainly of watercolours. The outstanding item is the 'Deliciae Botanicae' volume of flower drawings by George D Ehret, formerly in the Earl of Derby's collection, which dates from c 1732. A local artist, Henry Gustave Hiller, donated numerous illustrations of the reproductive structures of Anglesey seaweeds, some of which are available as framed and mounted specimens for exhibition. Other noteworthy drawings are the studies of Himalayan plants prepared by Indian artists, including Vishnupersaud, for John Forbes Royle at the Saharanpur Botanic Garden; an album of Chinese botanical drawings, thought to have been commissioned by John Reeves, from the library of the Earl of Derby at Knowsley Hall; watercolours of fungi by various local artists; and an album entitled "Twelve Posies Gathered in the Fields" containing paintings on vellum by James Bolton.
