Electronic Precinct - October 1998

Milestone for `lost' collection

In 1952, when the University of Liverpool assumed responsibility for the Liverpool Royal Institution's Museum, the University gave a remarkable collection of pressed plants, which had been housed in the Royal Institution, to Liverpool Museum. The collection had been assembled by the leading Victori an botanist John Forbes Royle. He had amassed the core of the collection between 1823 and 1831, when he was superintendent of the Saharanpur Botanic Garden in India. He pioneered the western study of economic botany (cash crops) in that country and also initiated the cotton industry.

Among the plants first identified by Royle was the Himalayan balsam, whose pink, orchid-like flowers have become familiar everywhere. Originally brought to Britain as a decorative garden plant, it has spread to roadside ditches and riverbanks.

Most of the specimens in the collection were gathered in the Himalayas, but later Royle added plants from places as far apart as South Africa, Siberia and Chile. Upon his return to Britain, he became a professor at King's College, London, and when he died in 1859, his widow donated the Herbarium to the Liverpool Royal Institution. The collection was effectively lost to science until its rediscovery amongst the remnants of the institution's museum in 1952.

In 1992 the mammoth task of preserving the specimens, over 12,000, which make up the collection began. Experts at Liverpool Museum recently reached the milestone of treating the 10,000th plant (a species of papyrus).

Dr John Edmondson, head of the museum's botany department said: 'This is an example of a successful collaboration between conservators and curators which has set new standards for the care of fragile historic plant specimens.'