Category: HerbariumPage 4 of 4

WeDigBio at the Botanics

There’s a first time for everything and last week the RBGE herbarium digitisation team hosted its first WeDigBio onsite transcription event! Worldwide Engagement for Digitising Biocollections, WeDigBio, is…

Meet the Valerian Family

“It’ll stink!  Tell me if you can’t stand it.  My cat adores it.”  Sweaty armpits, musty old rooms, smelly feet were all attempts at describing the smell of…

Disentangling the history of the Robert Brown specimens at RBGE

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 grass herbarium of General William Munro (1818–1880)

Scattered throughout the herbarium cabinets of Gramineae at Edinburgh are many sheets from the herbarium of the distinguished soldier and agrostologist William Munro, bearing a printed label ‘from…

Onwards and upwards to our next virtual expedition!

Following a very successful first expedition on DigiVol with ‘Proteaceae of Australia’ we are launching our second project ‘Ericaceae of Australia’. Our first project was launched as part…

Plant Collecting and the Lived Experience of Botany: Bill Burtt’s Malaysian Collecting

Brian Lawrence ‘Bill’ Burtt (1913-2008) began his career as a taxonomist at Kew Gardens, before coming to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in 1951. Throughout the course…

WeDigBio 19-22 Oct 2017

Help us unlock our collections data for use by researchers across the globe! As part of this year’s WeDigBio event, 19-22 October, we are launching a project to…

Nepalese Ambassador visits the Botanics

His Excellency Dr Durga Bahadur Subedi, Nepalese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, led a delegation from the Embassy in London to Scotland this weekend, visiting Edinburgh, Aberdeen and…

William Roxburgh’s herbarium specimens at RBGE

For many years I have been aware that in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (E) is more than one set of specimens collected in South…

Images now in GBIF

A couple of years ago GBIF started including images for occurrence records in their biodiversity portal.  Last week I was able to add images from our digital repository…

Spinning a Yarn

Over the past year, Glasgow based artist Simone Landwehr-Traxler has been studying some of the lichen specimens in the Herbarium at RBGE from the islands of Scotland.   Her…

A sculptural take on our Herbarium collection

In May 2017 the Scottish sculptor Bobby Niven visited the Herbarium here at RBGE for a tour of the collection. He was on a fact finding mission as…

Harvesting Collections for Social Benefit: Hidden Stories at the Herbarium of RBGE

Background to the project. The advent of the era of Big Data has highlighted a truism in scientific discovery: an inference is only as good as the data…

Another botanical William Jack

One of the most talented Scottish surgeon-botanists ever to have worked in Asia was the Aberdonian William Jack (1795–1822), who, before succumbing to fever aged only 27, acted…

Edward Bulkley and the Du Bois Herbarium

In the lead-up (or is it a wind-down?) to retirement I must clear my office, including four herbarium cabinets full of specimens laid aside from time to time…

A short film on Hugh Cleghorn: Indian Forester, Scottish Laird

A short film on Indian Forester, Scottish Laird and the personalities behind it.

These are a few of our favourite things

David Harris Herbarium Curator My favourite thing in the Herbarium is the labels on the cabinets. They tell us what is in the cabinet and where we are…