Author: Elspeth Haston
RBGE is a partner in an ambitious initiative to create a Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) as a new European Research Infrastructure. This currently includes 115 organisations…
Robert Brown (1773-1858) Born in Montrose, Scotland in 1773, Robert Brown made his mark as a scientist in botany and palaeobotany. He is most famously known for his…
The Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh dates back over 150 years to the mid-19th century and there are new and exciting specimens still to be discovered…
The Backhouse family is more widely known for their nursery based in the north of England. However, several members of the family also collected herbarium specimens which are…
In amongst the institutional archives of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh are items relating to the teaching of botany here, including lists of students going back to 1798. …
In the Autumn of 1914, George Forrest was travelling in China. His letters written at the time mention the difficulties he was facing in getting permission to…
4th August 1914 – collections on the day that war was declared between Britain and Germany On the 4th August 1914 the tension was building during the day…
There are nearly 3 million specimens being held in the herbarium at RBGE. We are working to digitise these specimens to make them available to people around the…
The geographical collecting locality of the types reflect both current and historical geographical areas of interest of RBGE research. Historical areas of focus are China (20%), India (8%)…
The oldest specimen in the herbarium at Edinburgh was collected in 1697. The oldest type specimen was collected in 1730. There have been several peaks during the time…
The type specimens held at RBGE were included in an analysis of plant collectors by Bebber et al. (2012) which showed that 50% of the type specimens were…
Since 2004, we have been digitising the type specimens* held in the herbarium at RBGE. This work has been funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation through the…