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F
or experts who work with
nature’s prettiest creations,
the staff at the Royal Horticul-
tural Society’s herbarium have
a morbid sense of humour:
“We’re trained killers.”Surrounded by
240 acres of lovingly tended gardens,
glasshouses, woods and meadows, the
herbarium is, in one sense, a resting
place for the garden’s former residents.
It is a resource for horticulturalists in
the UK and around the world. Its collec-
tions and expertise are crucial to the
RHS’s scientific work— much of which
is unknown to the millions of visitors to
its gardens at Wisley, 25 miles outside
London, every year. The society is an
international registration authority for
plants; the RHS Colour Chartis a global
standard, and its plant trials determine
which varieties win an Award of Garden
Merit — an invaluable stamp of approval
for nurseries and sellers.
The herbarium is tucked away in a
wing of the “Laboratory”, an Arts and
Crafts buildinghome to 86,700 plant
specimens that are nearly 300 years old,
each one dried, mounted, documented
and carefully filed over the centuries.
The collection is, in theory, accessible
to anyone with a reason to study it. But
the space and facilities are an obstacle to
outside researchers. Specimens can
travel — but they are fragile. Now, the
RHS is on a mission to transform access
to its treasures: a project is under way to
digitise not only the 86,700 plants
stored here, but all 400,000 cultivated
plants in the UK.
Thanks to generations of skilled
experts and the power of 21st-century
imaging technology, anyone with an
internet connection will be able to study
the plants as accurately as if the speci-
men were right before their eyes.
The project will be finished in autumn2020 and open in 2021, to coincide with
the building of a new home for the her-
barium, a £23m National Centre for
Horticultural Science and Learning at
Wisley. Both projects promise to over-
come the challenges of storing centu-
ries-old organic matter.
“In Europe and northern temperate
areas, conditions for having a herbar-
ium are not too challenging,” says John
David, head of taxonomy. “Having a
herbarium in tropical areas is really
difficult — you have to do a lot to
control the environment and it becomes
very expensive.”
Even in temperate Surrey there can
be humidity and pests; enemy number
one is the Biscuit Beetle. “The larvae
really chomp through the specimen,”
says Yvette Harvey, keeper of theherbarium, showing me one of 10 phe-
romone-based traps among the collec-
tion. In case bugs bypass the traps, there
is a never-ending cycle of freezing to kill
them off, with each specimen frozen
every two years.
“It’ll be a shame to leave this
wonderful building — it does have char-
acter — but the collections so desper-
ately need to be in a better environ-
ment,” says Harvey.
Among the treasures here are
samples that predate the RHS itself
(founded in 1804). The oldest are two
lavendula mounted on the same card,
dated August 25 and September 6 1731,
which researchers believe might origi-nate from the Chelsea Physic Garden.
The collection still offers up surprises,
even to staff who have been working
with it for many years. In 2013, Barry
Phillips, an assistant at the herbarium,
was conducting unrelated research
when he pulled a potato plant from the
files. Each specimen has tiny but essen-
tial notes attached to its card, and on
this one was written in black ink: “S.
America, C. Darwin”.
Comparison with records at Cam-
bridge confirmed that the plant origi-
nated from Darwin’s HMS Beagle voy-
age to South America of 1832-35. Col-
lected and dried in the Chonos Archipel-
ago, Chile, the leaves and flowers wereto make their records look beautiful.
“If you’re in the midst of a jungle and
it’s 90 per cent humidity, you’re tired,
you’ve just walked for 10km, the last
thing you want to be doing is trying
to fiddle around with a specimen and
making it look good on a piece of paper,”
says David. “Here, we have the luxury —
and it’s that much more important
because when you’re dealing with culti-
vated plants it’s that tiny difference
which is significant.”
Staff here collect and preserve about
1,000 cultivated plants a year.“It is
time-consuming,” says one, “collecting,
pressing, drying, mounting them, data-
basing, filing them.”They also record
the exact colours of different parts of the
plant while it is fresh.Experts trim and
layer the plants between sheets of card
and sponge, then puts these stacks in a
dehydrator for 24 hours.
“You’re trying to make a three-
dimensional thing two dimensions,”
says Phillips while separating the parts
of a purple echinacea, “to show each
side of the leaves, the front and back
of the petals.” It is delicate work, with
each tiny element laid across the card,
and a sample pressed in sterile paper to
be sent for DNA analysis. It gives you
a new appreciation for the nature’s
details, says Phillips:“Some have got
such fantastic shapes inside the flower,
and you don’t know they’re there unless
you dissect them.
“It’s nice to know you’re creating
something that someone’s going to look
at in 200, 300 years,” he adds.
The digital archivingsaves the plants
frommanhandling. “We started this
project in 2011 when the RHS decided to
be part of the Global Plants Initiative,”
says Mandeep Matharu,digitisa-
tion technician. “About 300
herbariums from 70 countries
were putting their crucial specimens
— types and standards — on to one
website.” With the RHS’s later
decision to put the whole herbarium
online, she has been based at Wisley
ever since, capturing images of the
freshly preserved cultivated plants
and working through the immense
collection of specimens.
“We’re very proud of the
way they look,” says David,
“but fundamentally these
are scientific specimens, they
are there to be used.” And
thanks to the last, relatively
new step in this long-
practised art ofpreser-
vation, they can be
used infinitely.(Top) creating a
herbarium
specimen; (far
left) Darwin’s
potato; (left) the
oldest samples,
two lavendula;
(below) a colour
chart for a
dahlia specimen
RHS/Bob Martin/Georgi
MabeeAnyone with internet will
be able to study the plants
as if the specimen wereright before their eyes
Digitising
Darwin’s potato
Gardens| The Royal Horticultural Society is opening
access to its herbarium to all. ByMaria Crawford
sent back to John
Stevens Henslow,
Darwin’s mentor
at Cambridge,
for identification.
In Darwin’s note,
the plant is S. tubero-
sum var. vulgare; to its
keepers, it is known
as “the spud”.
The basic prin-
ciple of preserving
flora has changed little since Darwin’s
time: both in the wild and in the Labora-
tory, plants must be dried swiftly to pre-
serve their colour and shape. In the her-
barium, staff have time and techniques
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